Latency 6000, Part 3: Valley of Death
by The Exile
Summary: NaNoWriMo winner '07. Rampaging Fel Reavers, dark secrets, unexpected alliances, true love, sentient gold selling bots, elementals of lag and disconnection and Ban Stick duels over 40 foot drops all feature in the third chapter of this epic WoW fic.
1. Chapter 1

Latency 6k

Part3: Valley of Death

"Mr. Killsteal?"

Deiter Killsteal felt strangely unembarrassed about being naked in front of the Spirit Guides. The fact that they looked asexual and wore blindfolds helped. He barely even registered the presence of the robed, hooded figure with wings that covered its body better than its ragged white cloth did. He nodded half-heartedly and returned to the newspaper in his lap. He wasn't quite sure how a newspaper manifested in the spirit world but it was just one of the things he had yet to understand about this realm. Usually – when everything was working - you just went straight there and back again, waiting only the few hours it took for a lazy priest to resurrect you. It was a very different place when you had been there for three weeks.

"Mister Killsteal, if you would care to accompany me..."

"Am I to be deleted, then?"

As he uttered the word 'deleted', his voice shook involuntarily. It was a primordial fear, something pre-genetically hard-wired into him. Total annihilation. To be wiped from the face of existence. To never exist again, to never have existed. Still, a part of him welcomed such a thing. It wasn't just out of morbid curiosity. He had nothing to go back for. He had lost everything. His sword and his horse were somewhere in Orgrimmar. He had failed to win the heart of his true love. Now she was gone, too, more distant than death. His faith, his dignity, his pride as a warrior... everything he had left to live for was lost. And now this... While he didn't understand anything the Spirit Guides babbled on about in their technical jargon, what he did understand was something was very wrong and that he could no longer resurrect. The afterlife was denied to him. He had fallen from grace.

"No, Mister Killsteal, I'm happy to be able to say that we're repairing the fault. You will soon be able to return to the world of the living." said the Spirit Guide, its voice ageless as a dream and neutral as a recorded message on an answer machine, "But there's someone we want you to meet."

"Doan?" he asked instinctively, his spirits lifting briefly. Then he remembered where he was. If Doan was here, she was dead. Despite the pain and madness she had put him through, he couldn't wish that upon her. Besides, she was more likely to be very much alive. Corpse camping him.

"No, Mister Killsteal. I really think you ought to see for yourself."

Intrigued despite his bleak despair, he took the Spirit Guide's outstretched hand. It felt cool, like a child's. The Guide led him across the ghostly blue plane that cast wispy shadows like broken mirrors as it overlapped with the world of the living. Sitting beside a tree in a swivel chair was a small child. The boy was swivelling around and around happily and kicking his legs. He looked odd, somewhere between a human and a blood elf, with pinched oriental features and thick black hair. When he saw Killsteal, the boy leapt off his seat and ran towards the paladin, tugging at his leg and babbling in what sounded like Thalassian.

"Who's this?" asked Killsteal, patting the child on the head. The boy kicked him on the shin and yelled something indignantly.

"You are this boy's character, Mister Killsteal. He created you." 


	2. Chapter 2

"Warchief, I urge you to reconsider!"

The old Orc raised his eyebrow at his revered spiritual leader, who sat on his throne of bone and wolf fur, a look of intense concentration in his bright blue eyes. His mighty warhammer was leant against the side of the throne. Stood around him were his High Priest, a tall female Troll in white robes and a voodoo mask, his Archmage, the old portal mage who wore signs of overwork in his stooped posture and weary expression, his advisor, an Orc with a snow white beard, and Gynoug Doomclipboard, his lawyer. The Orc looked decidedly unusual in his pin stripe suit, bowler hat and umbrella, except that the umbrella was made of fel iron and bore a wicked spike on the end. He had once slain ten warriors with his umbrella. In the heavily guarded confines of Grommash Hold, his umbrella was hefted over his shoulder and he held a thick wad of paperwork in his hands.

"I appreciate your concern over my safety." began Thrall, "But I am not afraid to put myself in danger to protect the Horde. A Warchief leads from the front."

"Fighting the Alliance is one thing. Going voluntarily into the spirit realm when there is no promise of safe resurrection is another." said the lawyer, "My Warchief, what would the Horde do if we lost you? Especially in the middle of such a crisis!"

"I believe this is the best, possibly the only, way to avert the crisis." said Thrall, "High Priest, you yourself said that the spirits are most probably angry with us."

She nodded, grinning to reveal a chicken bone between her teeth.

"Would it not be best." continued Thrall, "If your Warchief went to negotiate with them personally? Or if there is some kind of problem in the spirit realm, I will resolve it. Do you doubt my ability as a shaman?"

"Not at all, Warchief." Doomclipboard bowed, "I am no shaman to judge you."

"Then leave me to do what I must." he said, shifting on his chair, "Doomclipboard, I leave you in charge of distributing my instructions in my absence. You will ensure that all peons are taking correct work safety precautions and order a reduction in the number of raids and adventuring parties. We can't lose good men needlessly. High Priest, you will organise the priests on a round-the-clock rota. Archmage, your mages need to be creating portals for everyone who resurrects in the wrong place. Advisor... if this problem escalates any further..."

"Y... yes, Warchief?" the old Orc felt uncomfortable under the intensity of that cerulean gaze.

"Declare a temporary truce with the Alliance."

"WHAAAAAAAT?"

"People are dying and staying dead." said the Warchief, "If we wage war under these conditions, we'll be wiped out. Don't be stupid."

"But..."

"This meeting is adjourned." said Thrall. He was already making his throne more comfortable and eating herbs to put him in a trance. The High Priest helped him light incense burners and chanted over him. The lawyer shook his head and walked out of Grommash Hold. There was no use talking to a stubborn Thrall. Instead, he walked down towards the Valley of Honour. A stroll around the town would calm his nerves. Even in the middle of the crisis, Orgrimmar was bustling with life. Goblins hawked their wares in high-pitched shrieks from market stalls that sold everything conceivable, from fish to silk to swords. A group of Tauren with glazed expressions on their faces sat on a rock, taking turns to smoke a big pipe full of Peacebloom. Three guards were throwing rowdy drunks out of a pub. The auction house was, as usual, more of a war zone than Arathi Basin. Two Orcs had resorted to actually hitting each other with the merchandise. The shadow of the resurrection crisis still loomed over Orgrimmar in the form of regular patrols of six priests. The 2pm priest, a Blood Elf, fancied himself a prophet of doom and was yelling at the top of his voice about the end of the world while waving his hands around theatrically. Everyone ignored him.

Doomclipboard noticed ten guards run into the Auction House. The usual fighting was breaking into a full-scale riot. Remembering that people weren't supposed to be dying needlessly, he kept a careful eye on the rioters.

"PET? PET?" shrieked a goblin. A wolf howled back, "I'LL HAVE YOU KNOW THIS IS AN ELITE WARRIOR'S MOUNT!"

"YOU CAN'T SELL THOSE IN THE AUCTION HOUSE EITHER!" roared the guard, dragging him out by his hair with the help of three other guards, "If you stole that from a dead Orc, I'll have your head."

"It was a human!" he protested.

"Just get it out of the auction house!" the guard swiped at him with an axe. Missing the goblin completely, he almost caught the wolf's tail. It yelped and ran around in circles.

Doomclipboard recognised the wolf.

"Zelda!" he called. The wolf ran up to him and licked his hand.

"Zelda, where's your owner?"

The wolf whined.

Doomclipboard jumped on the back of his own riding wolf and rode out of Orgrimmar as fast as he could.

WARNING: RESURRECTION ERROR.

WARNING: GATEMASTER NOT PRESENT.

Doan looked down at her own crumpled form lying underneath the computer, inches away from the frayed cable that had given her the fatal electric shock. She never could get used to this. Her wolf stood over her corpse, howling and nudging her with his nose occasionally. She was worried the stupid thing would get itself electrocuted as well. Eventually it gave up and ran up the stairs. The ceiling rose up automatically, allowing him exit from the little room, into the vast glimmering desert of the Shimmering Flats. Now she only had the message on the screen to worry about. 'Resurrection Error'. It wasn't the sort of thing she wanted to hear when she had just died.

The spirit guide should have been here by now. There was usually one waiting for her, to guide her back to the realm of the living, either to where her corpse was or to a graveyard if something happened to her corpse that made it unrecoverable. Not that she died very often. She was well hidden in her underground bunker, her computers had defence systems that protected her from the few things that found their way in and attacked her, and she no longer involved herself in the war. It was only because of a stupid mistake that she was here right now. She should never have touched the faulty wire without gloves. Ten years of exile with only a computer and a wolf for company should have taught her not to do things like that. As she chided herself over and over again, she wandered through the barren planes of the spirit realm. Through the rifts in the fabric of time, she could see her wolf running through the Shimmering Flats, then the rocky canyons of Thousand Needles. Underneath the Great Lift, tending to the soul of an unfortunate drunken Tauren who had fallen off it while guarding it, was a Spirit Guide.

"Excuse me..." began Doan. The tall, pale winged figure, covered in a burial shroud, turned around and regarded her with sightless eyes.

"We apologise for the delay, ma'am. We are rather stretched for staff at the moment due to the problems we've been having. Please return to your place of death and wait. A Spirit Guide will be with you shortly."

Doan sighed and trudged back to the Shimmering Flats. The door opened for her even when she was dead. The computer could sense the presence of her disembodied spirit. She bent over her corpse and tried to touch it. It occurred to her to be careful not to electrocute herself again straight away. Her hand passed straight through her body's forehead and into the floor without even a twinge of a reaction. She sighed and squatted on the floor. Eventually, a Spirit Guide drifted in through the ceiling.

"Are you experiencing technical difficulties?" it asked.

"Well..." she wasn't sure how to explain herself. Talking to people was something she had difficulty with. Apart from the occasional goblin trader lost on his way to Gadgetzan, or a raiding party of Night Elves who attempted to gank her, she never saw another living thing. If Spirit Guides counted as living things.

"Have you attempted to resurrect?"

"No, but..."

"Is your corpse available?"

"Yes, but..."

"We apologise for the inconvenience. We are experiencing difficulties with the entire resurrection system. Please follow me. We would like to run a series of short tests. It shouldn't hurt."

"Of course it won't hurt. I'm dead." she muttered.

She followed the Spirit Guide anyway. It walked out of the room again and across the desert towards the mountains. Placing its hand upon the rock face, it walked straight through the mountain. Doan followed it. A tingling feeling passed through her ethereal body and she briefly saw white numbers scroll down her vision, disjointed and strangely lopsided. Then she was in a chamber inside the mountain, one she was pretty sure hadn't existed on any world map of Azeroth she had ever seen. It was roughly circular and had no ceiling, the walls narrowing near the top to make a funnel that stretched longer than her eyes could see. Structures were hewn from the rock to make it look like some kind of surreal waiting room. It had a counter with a Spirit Guide sitting at a chair like a receptionist, a small mesa with a toaster and a coffee machine balanced on top of it, next to a natural depression in the slab filled with water. Newspapers were piled on another raised surface next to a tray of cups and a basket of sugar packets. There were crackling blue orbs over metal dishes that she recognised as components of the World Server. Images of windows were occasionally thrown out of the top of the orbs. Spirit Guides watched them intently. Doorways led off to what she assumed were more chambers.

"Please wait in the waiting room." her Guide told her. It glided away to talk to the Guides at the computers. She tried to overhear the conversation but the Spirit Guides spoke in sibilant whispers that sounded like more than one person talking at once.

"What the hell does a dead person need a toaster for?" she asked the receptionist.

"The waiting room is designed to appear familiar to mortals so as to provide a relaxing and comfortable environment." it said, "Some of our customers have been waiting for some time."

It pointed to an exit. She followed the directions and found herself in another, much larger chamber. In the middle of the chamber was a cage of crackling blue energy. It was full of people – Orcs, Forsaken, Tauren and Trolls. They were heavily armed and armoured and absolutely furious. One or two were throwing themselves at the walls of the cage and attempting to poke weapons through but the light was solid.

"Warsong Gulch malfunctioned." explained the Spirit Guide, "The Alliance entrance is on the other side, next to the Alliance waiting room."

Doan bowed her head.

"I'm an exile." she admitted, "You won't find me on your records. I do not exist."

The Spirit Guide made a noise that could have been a sigh of irritation. With a flourish of one hand, he produced a coruscation of cobalt light that twisted and morphed itself into the shape of a record book. It summoned a gust of wind that flicked through it while the Spirit Guide peered at its records. After a few minutes of this – considering the size of the book, it must have been a fast reader – it dismissed the book from existence within the realm and peered at her again.

"Everybody in Azeroth is on our records. You are an anomaly. Why?"

"I'm not an anomaly. This whole thing is an anomaly." she said, waving her arms to indicate the waiting room, the Spirit Guide, the cage full of angry warriors, "What's wrong here and when is it going to be fixed?"

"We are working to resolve the problem. Please wait."

Doan folded her arms,

"I have spent five years living in a cave with only the World Server to talk to." she told it, "The computers told me this was a minor problem. I had no idea of the scale of what was going on here."

"Ah, so you are a GM."

"GMs haven't existed for fifteen years." she sighed, "I told you, I'm nobody. I deleted my own records, okay?"

The Spirit Guide paused as though not sure what to make of this.

"If you have access to the World Server, you will know that it is examining itself for errors but cannot find any irregularities. The problem is not originating within the Server itself. We are searching all of Azeroth for the source of the error but we cannot find it yet."

"Could it have come from outside Azeroth?" she demanded. A prickle went down her neck.

"We have received no reports of communications with aliens."

Doan tried to think of another possibility. Just then, another Spirit Guide – she couldn't tell them apart – walked in and began speaking to her.

"You should be capable of resurrection. However, your spirit is not responding to your corpse. You will be able to resurrect at one of the specified points of spiritual overlay."

"A graveyard, you mean?" This would mean resurrection sickness. Her clothes would be ruined. What a rotten day.

"We cannot guarantee that you will be returned to the exact same spot that you attempt to resurrect at. The rifts are misaligned. We accept no responsibility for any misteleportation or loss of personal items."

Which means I could end up anywhere, she thought, possibly naked.

"Please, I need to return to my computer. The World Server..."

"We will make every endeavour to return you as close as possible to your corpse. Please wait."

Doan sighed and watched the Spirit Guide stretch out its arms. A pale blue nimbus around it slowly grew brighter and brighter, spreading like a halo. She was forced to shut her eyes against the blinding light that seared her soul in its spiritual magnificence.

Then she fell to the earth with a wet thud.


	3. Chapter 3

Waking up in an open grave wasn't her favourite pastime.

She coughed and spluttered. Dank, saturated soil had covered up her face and fallen into her nostrils. For an awful second, she thought someone had buried her alive. Grasping and clawing in desperation, she flung the soil away. It was only a fine layer after all, blown in by the wind. Then a wave of dizzying nausea hit her. Every joint ached and her head pounded like the worst hangover in the world. The acrid smell of death added to her condition. For ten minutes, all she could do was lie with her eyes half-closed, trying not to vomit, staring up at the night sky. She was too weak even to move. When she finally managed to move enough to claw her way out of the earthen hole she lay in, her head span again and she retched repeatedly into the hole.

She heard a sound behind her. From out of the corner of her eye, she saw a large human priest advancing towards her in full regalia, a mace at his belt. With a low growl, she turned around and pounced.

"TOO LATE!" she yelled in Common.

"UDEN LO!" The priest screamed. He ran, ran from the dirty, smelly human who just clawed her way out of a grave and started hitting him and ranting at him in such a strong Durotar accent that she sounded like a flipping Orc.

"OH NO, YOU WON'T BE CAMPING MY CORPSE TONIGHT! DON'T TRY AND RUN! YOU DESERVE THIS, YOUNG MAN! YOU KNOW WHAT I HATE MOST IN THIS WORLD? CORPSE CAMPING! FACE YOUR FATE LIKE A MAN OF HONOUR! HEEEEEEERE PRIESTIE PRIESTIE PRIESTIE!"

"GUARDS!" screamed the priest, running as he tried to deflect the ghoulish harridan's wild blows.

"I'LL GIVE YOU GUARDS IN A MINUTE!" she yelled, summoning a cursor from the depths of the technology elemental plane and poking him in the eye with it. She chased him out of the graveyard and through a beautiful apple orchard, across a well-trodden earthen path that passed by an impressively large church with an old woman tending the flower bed and a bell that rang nine o' clock, through a courtyard with a beautiful fountain, surrounded by three Gnomish engineering shops and another large church, this one with paladins chatting outside it, down a wide street with an inn on it, before the priest finally found a burst of desperation-fuelled strength and disappeared through a towering white stone archway and an impenetrable-looking iron gate which two of the small platoon of human guards in white armour and blue tabards lifted.

Doan stopped.

She took another look around.

One of the guards glared at her. The priest was babbling something about zombies and pointing at her.

She took another look around. It wasn't quite sinking into her head yet. It was a little like a cartoon: the cat chases the mouse off the cliff and doesn't realise it is suspended over a cliff until it looks down, its legs pinwheeling, then its face drops and it plummets down with a comical scream. A bit like that.

She fainted.

It didn't go away when she woke up.

A loud chime woke her up. It was the church across the road, striking nine o' clock. She groaned and put her pillow over her head. She hadn't slept in a real bed for years. The computer didn't understand what a human needed for comfort. All she had to sleep on was a blanket in the corner of the room that she couldn't train the wolf not to lie on. It was warm here, her bed was soft and comfortable. She felt much better, although she had only slept for three hours and felt like she just wanted to drift back off to sleep. Yawning and stretching, she forced herself to wake up and open the curtains. She immediately drew them back again.

She felt like curling up into a foetal position and crying. However, she realised that it wouldn't help her much.

Not in the middle of Stormwind City.

She considered just running downstairs, dying and hoping she reincarnated somewhere else. However, something held her back. If not a sense of self-preservation, then a fear of wherever 'somewhere else' might be. She might not even come back at all. What was more, her death would be violent and messy and painful, she had already recovered from one bout of resurrection sickness and she really didn't want to have to suffer again.

She had done this before. It was a long time ago. As far as she could remember, it involved goblins, fish and pretending to be disconnected. She checked her pockets. She had no fish, only a couple of apples she had stolen from the orchard while chasing the priest. There were no goblins in the immediate area. She would have heard them if there were. The acting...

There was a large mirror on top of a cabinet in the room, above a cup of tea, some spare sheets and a holy book. She faced it and did her best impression of Revoemag in the throes of disconnection, spinning a jerky dance on the spot where no move followed the next. Through her other senses, the part of her steeped deeply in a world underneath the mundane realm, a net of brightly coloured lights and numbers, she saw the red strands clinging to her lovingly as she imitated their incarnation on earth.

"Lass? Ye awake?"

She reached for her staff and hid behind the door. At her command, the cursor hovered just in front of the door at what she hoped was groin height for a Dwarf. After a couple of knocks, the door opened. A heavily armoured Dwarf with an axe at his belt walked in.

"Lass?" he repeated. He looked around the room. When he didn't find her at first, he looked in the bed, under the bed and out of the window. Doan yawned and stepped out from behind the door.

"Ah, there ye are, lass! I wus beginnin' tae worry about ye!" he said, "It wus a fair fricht ye gave Father Augustine! He thocht ye wus Undead, risin' up oot o' a grave like that, white as a sheet!"

He thinks I'm a human, she realised. Well... okay, I am a human... I guess... am I? She was impressed by how much Dwarven she understood. She always had a gift for languages. Back at University she had studied German and was taking evening classes in other languages. She would have received a high grade, had she carried on with her studies and not accidentally fallen through a portal into another world. She also spoke fluent Orcish, passable Common and Trollish and a few words of Thalassian. However, Darnassian eluded her as a language, she didn't have the patience to talk to Gnomes long enough to learn any Gnomish and Taurahe was unpronounceable to anyone who didn't eat grass.

"I... I'm sorry. I... really didn't mean to... I resurrected in the wrong place." she stammered, "Can I go now?"

"I gathered that might be it. It's a' a shock when it happens to ye." he responded, "Well, come on an' get a pint o' ale down ye! It's the cure for resurrection sickness!"

Judging by the smell of the old Dwarf, it was the cure for everything. Noting that he wasn't trying to cleave her head with the axe, she followed him out of the room and down the rickety wooden stairs of the inn. It was fairly busy but not too crowded. Apart from the Dwarf and the innkeeper, she saw a small gang of Gnomes, four Humans, one of which looked like a priest and a Night Elf in the corner playing the piano. The tune sounded like the Altered Beast theme. She started humming it under her breath instinctively.

"A flagon o' Dwarven Stout fer me an' Stormwind ale fer the lady!" yelled the Dwarf.

"You've already had five." the innkeeper sighed and poured him another one anyway. The Dwarf dropped two gold on the counter.

"So, Sleeping Beauty's awake?" the innkeeper gave Doan a pointed look.

"Aye, says she resurrected in the wrong place."

One of the Gnomes piped up with a comment at this point, rambling excitedly in his childish voice. The Dwarf glared at her.

"Dinnae lie! Ye've never left Goldshire, ye wee runt! If I hear one more tale oot o' ye..."

Doan stared dejectedly at her drink. She stared down at the Dwarf, then looked slowly around the room at the other patrons. Then she looked back at her drink again. She considered darting under the table and using it as a shield.

"Don't look so glum. It's over now. You're perfectly safe. You're in the heart of Stormwind City!"

"I... I know." she muttered, her voice coming out in a strangled gasp.

"My, that's a strange accent." said the Night Elf in Common, "Odd clothes, too. Are you from Kalimdor?"

"Thousand Needles." she said.

"There's a settlement in Thousand Needles?"

"N... no, that's not where I live, it's... it's where I died." she said, her face going white again, "L... look, I really... REALLY need to leave Stormwind. It's comp... complicated."

"You're a long way from home, my friend." said the Night Elf, "I know a mage of no small talent. Mayhap he can teleport you into friendly territory?"

"No!" she yelled, "I... I mean..."

"What were you doing in Thousand Needles that could kill you, anyway? You don't look the warrior type." said the Night Elf.

"You! Stop being rude!" the Dwarf reprimanded him.

"I... I'm..." she stammered. Her vision was blurring, and not just from the ale. She looked at the Night Elf again, wishing he would stop asking awkward questions. Then she saw the discarded piano and had an idea.

"Why, I'm a bard!" she said.

"Really? An entertainer?" asked the innkeeper.

"Of course! How else could she do such a convincing ghoul impression?" the Night Elf snapped his fingers.

"I've been touring Kalimdor." she added, "I... er... was on my way to Gadgetzan. Goblins pay well for good music."

"Come on, lass, play us a tune!" said the Dwarf, slamming his tankard on the side of the bar.

Sighing, she walked to the piano and began playing the second Alliance theme from Warcraft 2. She wasn't much of a piano player but the audience were very drunk. The Dwarf's face lit up and he began tapping his foot and singing along in a loud baritone voice. All the Gnomes knew the words and joined in, their high-pitched voices a contrast to the Dwarf.

"A traditionalist!" said the Night Elf, a tone of approval in his voice. He took a lute out of his backpack and started playing along. Soon it began to sound like a fairly good rendition. She played the first Alliance theme when the Gnomes began to look bored, then the third and fourth. Two of the Gnomes attempted to dance on the tables to this while the third started mooing and acting like a Tauren. With an unimpressed look on his face, the Dwarf pushed one of them off the table. The innkeeper laughed. He was pleased that spirits were beginning to lift in his inn. The loud singing had attracted four new customers already. The story of yesterday had mostly been forgotten or distorted beyond recognition by Gnomish gossip – Doan was now apparently the Liche King incarnate and had been slain personally by the priest using only apples. As the night went on, Doan sang the war room theme, the victory fanfare – which, she learned, traditionally had to last at least an hour - and the Game Over tune. She played a good Game Over tune.

"Ach, dinnae sing that!" said the Dwarf, bursting into tears, "Thae last time I heard that, ten years ago, we wus retreatin' from Warsong Gulch. I wus thae only survivor. Twenty of us – thae finest warriors in Dun Morogh – we wus ambushed in thae valley. Crawlin' with them, it wus. Fell upon us all at once. I held my closest comrade in my arms, his life's blood drainin' away, callin' fer a priest, but thae priest wus already dead. Nothin' I could do but avenge him. I slew ten o' them myself before I wus forced tae retreat. He lies in thae barrow now."

"I... I'm sorry..." said Doan, bowing her head.

"It's okay, Lola. He died an honourable warrior." said the priest, reaching over and patting him on the shoulder, "And he will be remembered always. That's why we play the funeral march. To remember those who died honourably for the Alliance."

"FOR THE ALLIANSHE!" yelled one of the Gnomes drunkenly, throwing beer all over his nearest friend. Doan jumped and actually hid under the table this time. The Night Elf peered at her curiously.

"Er... I've run out of songs?" said Doan, sounding like a kid caught stealing cookies from the cookie jar. The Night Elf shook his head, sighed and wandered off. Doan retreated further under the table and finally fell asleep. 


	4. Chapter 4

Doan was awoken by a knock on the door. The cursor reached the door before she managed to grab her staff from where she left it beside her pillow as she slept. A loud raucous yell in drunken Dwarven preceded another knock. Her eyes narrowed and a growl escaped from her throat as she concentrated on the red strings she saw all around her, untangling them and pulling them into a net that she threw in front of the door to catch the guards that were no doubt on the other side of the door, waiting to jump her all at once, cut her down like a dog and nail her still bleeding corpse to the highest flagpole in the city as a gruesome example to others.

"Lass, yer gonnae miss the coach if ye dinnae wake up!"

She paused, leaving the net hanging over the door frame like a sword of Damocles. Positioning the cursor at groin height for the Dwarf again, she walked over and opened the door.

"Coach?" she asked blearily.

"Aye, the coach leaves in an hour, bound fer Western Plaguelands." he said jovially, "Ye said ye were in a rush to leave the fair Capital, so I booked ye a seat."

"Why would ANYONE want to go THERE?" she hissed. She was in no mood to be grateful. Her head hurt.

"The Church have organised a small pilgrimage to the burial mound of Uthar Lightbringer. Just tae bring a little light intae the world, raise morale in these difficult times. Good idea, if ye ask me." he explained, "The caravan's well guarded an' a', what wi' all thae priests an' paladins."

"Priests and paladins. Right. Very... good." she put her head in her hands and groaned.

"I packed ye a little provisions fer the long journey." he said, handing her a backpack, "Food, a couple gold an' a few bottles o' the finest Dwarven stout. Not like that muck ye drink in Kalimdor. What dae ye put in it – Ogre dung?"

Doan thanked him, stood up and shouldered the backpack. Still lecturing her about ale, the Dwarf walked back down the stairs into the inn. The sun had just risen and was still dim enough to not feel like a knife stabbing through her eyes. No real knives were stabbing her in the eyes either. In fact, none of the other patrons were awake yet and the barman was too busy cleaning a glass. She followed him out of the door and into the busy streets of Stormwind City. It was pretty much the same as any big city – although not overcrowded, as it was first thing in the morning, it was noisy and fairly lively even at this hour. Church bells rang, children played, dogs barked and merchants hawked their wares from shops. Guards patrolled the streets and the walls high above her. Try as she might to avoid the eyes of the guards, they were everywhere. She found herself looking even more suspicious, her eyes darting every which way, her shoulders flinching at every sound of a weapon being drawn. The Dwarf's merry nonchalance calmed her down a little. He was still humming one of the songs she played last night. She had never thought of herself as a bard – she was just very experienced at playing the few songs she liked. If you like that sort of thing, she supposed, you could probably appreciate her music. She joined in singing the infectious tune and soon had a random guard singing it as well.

Walking past a beautiful fountain surrounded by white marble, before which a priest harangued them enthusiastically, they eventually reached the Dwarven District. The Dwarf talked to the guards and showed them some sort of ticket. After a short conversation in which one of the guards pointed at her and yelled something in Darnassian, scaring the hell out of her, the guards let them both past onto something she vaguely recognised from pictures as the Deeprun Tram. Despite herself, she couldn't help but press her face against the window and gasp as they sped through the middle of colossal mountains and deep underwater. So there was some beauty even in these lands... The Dwarf laughed at her and told her to 'stop gawking like a dumb country maiden'. She wished the machine hadn't been so fast in taking them to their destination. Still, it did smell of Gnomes. She refused to sit at the front of the tram, near driver's cabin. The Dwarf said he understood and didn't like the 'tiny squeaky little bastards' either. Alighting from the tram, Doan was half-dragged through the streets of the mighty Dwarven stronghold, with its river of fire from the volcano deep within the mountain the city was literally forged from. She found the heat a little stifling but approved of being warm. A few heavily armoured Dwarves yelled at him to stop and talk to them but he shouted back that he was already late. They ran after him.

The coach waited just outside the gates. It was a sturdy-looking caravan with mahogany panels and red cloth banners and seats. Two large brown horses stood grazing, their reins fastened to the caravan. One snorted in distaste at the decidedly odd-smelling human and the Dwarf who had ale on his breath already. Doan looked up at the passengers. She couldn't see who was inside the more luxurious cabin. On top of the caravan she saw four or five humans and a figure too large to be human, garbed in the white robes of a priest, a massive mace hanging at his belt. Most of the humans wore the tunics and swords of paladins except for one man. Tall and broad-shouldered, he wore a brown tunic and a green robe. His clothes looked like he had been travelling in them for days and his face looked equally worn. His blonde hair was matted and cut roughly, his face covered in rough stubble. The expression on his face was one of exhaustion. Curled up sound asleep on his lap was a small child. Its face was completely hidden by a cowled brown cloak and she could not tell what gender it was.

She moved to take a closer look at the non-human priest and stopped, gawking Seeing her staring at him, he turned to look at her and smiled. She realised what she was doing and blushed. His purple eyes lit up with soft humour in his craggy aquamarine face. He said something to her in Draenei that she completely failed to understand.

"He says nae to worry, lass, he gets that from everyone. It's a rare man who's seen a Draenei." translated the Dwarf, "I remember when ye could walk down the streets o' Stormwind and see his folk everywhere. I remember buyin' a gem from a Draenei gemcutter to put in a ring for my first love. Fair of face she was, with flowing flaxen hair in perfect braids..."

"Then the Portal closed, right?" said Doan. The Dwarf translated for the Draenei and she saw his tentacles visibly droop.

"He says, it was a terrible day fer us all. Most o' his folks were swallowed when things started gettin' pulled in. The rest are dyin' out. There just weren't enough o' them tae carry on as a species here on Azeroth."

Doan had heard the story before. It was from the perspective of the Blood Elves but it was the same story – the Dark Portal just slammed shut one day without warning. Everyone in Outlands was lost. The portal didn't close cleanly, either: parts of space and time just warped and distorted, dragging things into the portal as it ground shut, never to open again. To this day, nobody understood what caused the portal to close. Had the demons simply grown strong enough to drag the realm into the Twisting Nether? Had the portal itself malfunctioned, a magical rift causing it to collapse in on itself? Was it an act of the Light?

Doan knew what really happened that day. She had been on Earth at the time, still just an ordinary human, a student trying to graduate, afford food and cope with the world's worst connection speed. She remembered when the Burning Crusade patch began experiencing serious technical difficulties and was eventually deleted. It was replaced with newer and better patches and expansions but the Blood Elf and Draenei characters were lost forever. People were almost killed in the riots. She herself lost a character to the closing of the portal. She hadn't really thought about it before she met the Draenei, not for a long time. Now it pained her. She remembered exactly why she was in exile.

"He says, nae use dwellin' on it now." translated the Dwarf. Doan hadn't even heard the soft-voiced Draenei speak. "The coach is leavin' now. Hop on board."

Doan climbed up the rail and sat herself down on the front of the carriage beside the Draenei and in front of the man with the child. The driver cracked his whip and the horses whinnied and sprang to life, pulling the carriage behind them. The Dwarf waved at her, then was dragged back inside by a crowd of about five Dwarven soldiers, presumably to the nearest tavern. Even as the impenetrable iron gates of Ironforge receded into the distance, she felt a great weight lifted from her shoulders. Her headache was slowly leaving her. The sun shone brightly now, casting shadows upon the frosty moors of Dun Morogh. A few cottages and the odd inn dotted the grass beside the road, along with a sign that read 'Brewnall Village: 10 miles". She found herself involuntarily whistling another tune.

After ten minutes or so, the Draenei – who introduced himself as Thraxier F. Golddark - began talking to her. One of the paladins translated for her.

"What reason have you for taking this pilgrimage, friend? Have you a Calling?"

"What? Er... no, I'd make an awful paladin."

"Ah, but I see the Light in your eyes already. You should consider it, friend. Maybe being in Uthar's noble presence would make you change your mind, yes?"

"Actually, I was going to get off at the..."

"I have visions sometimes, at the feet of such holy relics." continued the Draenei, "I seek such spiritual guidance again. I travelled here ten years ago to make my paladin vows. Every pilgrim has their own reason, even if it is only to say they have been to Uthar's grave in their lifetime."

"I go for blessing in battle." the woman added.

"My friend here is injured, we wish to be healed by Uthar's light." said the paladins at the back of the coach.

"And you?" the Draenei asked the man with the child, who was now awake and staring out from under his hood, studying everything with rapt and silent concentration.

"I..." the man did not look up, "It's a personal matter."

"Very well, friend, I will not pry into a man's personal relationship with the Light." said the Draenei.

As the cart rattled along the road, conversation turned to other topics. The paladins told everyone how they had been wounded. They had been aiding Light's Hope Chapel in the Eastern Plaguelands, holding off the shambling undead hordes of old Darrowshire, when the two of them had been separated from the main force. An Abomination rushed the two of them. Although they slew the foul beast, it left a hideous gash across the paladin's chest. The wound had become infected. Both paladins were worried he might die of it and be raised as Scourge.

"If he comes back at all." added the Draenei, "One in ten people I try and resurrect don't."

"Ah, the troubles." said the woman, "I heard a man died in Darkshire and was resurrected in the middle of Desolace."

"Some are calling it a punishment from the Light." said the paladin, "But I do not believe so. Otherwise, why are the wicked and the righteous affected equally? I say that it is the work of demons."

The conversation turned to a loud theological debate between the two paladins and the priest. Doan herself was also wondering what was causing the error. She was worried it was something much more dangerous than the Alliance's stupid gods, or even the spirits having a temper tantrum. That part of her from Earth reckoned a forty-strong raid party of level seventies could take on a god if needed. If the World Server was displaying error messages, something could have gone wrong with the very fabric of Azeroth. Both entire armies couldn't save all living things from being annihilated from the face of Azeroth if resurrection just... stopped working. Even imagining it made the tips of her fingers grow cold.

The man with the child did not speak throughout the entire journey. The expression on his face had become more pained since the Draenei spoke to him. He looked on the brink of throwing himself in front of the cart. The child either slept or stared out of the window, pulling on the man's arm and pointing at things, demanding an explanation of everything as though it hadn't seen such things as birds, trees, the sun, wolves, bears and Gnomes before. This part of Azeroth was new to her as well. It had gotten her thinking... wondering what would have happened if she had ever reached the other shore on that boat, fifteen years ago. All through her ordeal, all she could think about was her own survival. She hadn't really thought of the implications of what was happening... they all thought she was a human... an odd human, dirty and smelly and bad-mannered, possibly some sort of paladin. She realised that her terror wasn't just about being in enemy territory. She felt genuine revulsion at the idea of breaking her oath to Thrall. It would be so easy, and yet she would sooner throw herself off Thunder Bluff after sleeping with a Tauren with the plague than do so. And there was something more. Something darker. She had felt a chill touch down her spine when the Draenei looked at her with those alien eyes and said those words... like a hand upon her soul... even though she had never even considered the idea before, she was mortally terrified of the idea of ever being forced to become a paladin. Could one have negative religious experiences? Be blinded by the light? She felt sick again. Forcing herself to stop thinking about such things, she pulled her cloak over her eyes and tried to sleep.

An hour later, she was interrupted by the child's terrified scream.

One of the paladins went down before anyone had even noticed the gaunt figures jump out of the tall grass and spring at them. The paladin disappeared, dragged off the top of the coach, still desperately trying to stab at his assailant. The Draenei grabbed his mace and jumped off the coach, the weapon in his hand lighting up with a brilliant white aura. Two Forsaken ran at him but were cut down by the sure swings of his mace. He yelled encouragement to the others in Draenei, chanting some litany of purification. The woman's hands flared in a coruscation and bolts of fire shot from them, raining down on one of the darting figures, knocking it backwards off the coach. Moving in front of her to protect her, the two remaining paladins found themselves surrounded by the five who had managed to scramble up onto the coach. Doan tried to jump off but her feet were knocked out from under her. The coach was rocking to one side. Someone was underneath it, trying to overturn it. Doan clung onto the seat. One of the ambushers tried to grab the child. Roaring a ferocious battle cry, the man grabbed a greatsword from one of the paladins, easily released the weapon from his grasp and swung the sword in a wide arc, driving the Forsaken back. The child hid behind him. Two more Forsaken jumped him. He span around and impaled one on his sword before kicking them away and cleaving the other man's head with an overhand blow. Doan heard a scream as the horses died. The cart lurched dangerously. There were now more Forsaken trying to grab onto the coach than there were off it. She took this opportunity to dive underneath one of the paladin's feet and jump off the coach. A patch of bracken broke her fall, though it still left her bruised and winded. A Forsaken with a long poisoned dagger stood over her and tried to stab her. She threw out red strands of pure latency that wrapped themselves around his arms and legs, pulling him back. He looked at his dagger, faintly surprised at how long it was taking for him to plunge it into the annoying human. She clicked her finger and he stopped and fell to the ground, a cursor embedded in his throat. Dropping into the bracken, she had the vantage point of the battle raging all around her. The priest ran past her, keeping back three opponents at once. In the grip of righteous fury, he swung his mace around his head, striking a blow with each swing. She should run, she decided, while the Undead were occupied with trying to take the berserk priest down. She was somewhere in Wetlands. She wasn't sure she could run to Alterac Foothills without being caught but she had no other option. Just as she moved to dart into the nearest bush, she heard an imperious voice:

"STOP THAT RIGHT NOW!"

The Forsaken all immediately halted as though inanimate once again. The humans and Draenei stopped as well in their confusion. A woman had opened the carriage door and stepped out. A Forsaken woman in well-polished chain mail and a bright red tabard. She was surprisingly intact for an Undead. Her short-cropped hair hung over skin that was, if deathly pale, not actually rotting. She looked like she had taken great care to spend a few hours of every day alone with a mirror, a few rolls of bandages and a bucket of formaldehyde. At her side hung a sword and shield.

"General di Gloinador!" the nearest Forsaken warrior saluted her.

"All raids are called off." she told him. How in hell's name had she managed to get inside the coach undetected?

"But, General, we received orders..."

"Overruled." she swung her head around, "Orders from Sylvanus herself. Resurrection crisis. Emergency measures. No raids."

"I do not care if I am resurrected, if I die in battle against the filthy Alliance!" spat one of the warriors, brandishing his sword over his head and running at the priest. The General was faster. Stepping in front of him, she idly disarmed him and pointed her sword at his throat.

"Disobey my orders again and I'll butcher you like the treacherous dog you are."

"Y... yes, General! Sorry, General!"

"Now get back to Undercity. Now. Or I'll make your miserable lives hell in Arathi Basin."

She pointed her sword and the raiders ran in the direction she pointed in, melting back into the long grass. The Draenei opened his mouth to speak but closed it again when she turned to glare at him. Sheathing her sword again, she casually walked away. Then, stopping before the bush where Doan was hiding, she grabbed her by the hair and dragged Doan behind her down the hill.

They did not stop until the confused yells and angry cries receded. Letting Doan drop to the ground, the woman hid behind a tree.

"Ow!" complained Doan in Gutterspeak, rubbing the back of her head – her accent was awful but she knew all the best swear words - "What the bloody hell was that for?"

"I rescued you from the Alliance and that's all the thanks I get?" hissed the woman, "I had to hide in a tiny room that smells of horses and gnomes for you! If I hadn't noticed you being carted off like that, you'd be rotting in Durnholde by now!"

"What were you doing there in the first place?" asked Doan, folding her arms.

"Something I never want to do again in my life." she whispered, "Pray to whatever spirits you worship that this nightmare ends."

"I don't understand..."

"A temporary ceasefire. My beautiful Arathi Basin... empty... silent as the grave..." she looked ready to burst into tears.

"Ceasefire? Since when?"

"The orders from Orgrimmar came only yesterday. The resurrection crisis has worsened. People aren't coming back."

Doan's face went white.

"I have to get back to Thousand Needles." she said, "Now."

"Hiding in the desert won't help you."

"There's nowhere left to run or hide. But if I get back to Thousand Needles, I might be able to fix what's going wrong. It's the only chance we have."

"I'd get the Zeppelin from Undercity. It's a safe way to travel and it takes you right outside Orgrimmar." she said, "I'll take you to Undercity– we can travel faster on foot than they can in that rickety old cart – but I don't have time to go with you after that."

I'm banished from Orgrimmar, Doan began to say, but thought better of it. She could walk from Durotar to Thousand Needles. It would probably be easier the second time around.

"Ma'am?" she asked.

"Yes?"

"How do you know who I am?"

"I'd recognise Revoemag's pet human anywhere."

Doan suddenly recognised her. She snapped her fingers.

"Jane, right? The crazy recruiter lady!"

The woman's hand snapped forwards and she grabbed Doan by the front of her cloak, holding her up against the tree.

"Doan... Revoemag owed me a debt. As you were in her charge, she passed that debt on to you when she died. I can't collect right now, but rest assured, I will come for you."

"Sorry, crazy lady, but I can't fight for the Horde either." said Doan, smiling humourlessly. Something about the look in her eyes – and the way she wasn't resisting – made Jane drop her.

"You look perfectly healthy to me. Why not?"

"Because..." Doan leant on her staff and turned around, her cloak sweeping over to wrap around her, "I was banished from the Horde." 


	5. Chapter 5

The drums were quiet. The chanting had stopped.

Thrall opened his eyes and looked around. This landscape was familiar to him. It was something he hadn't seen in a long time but it was familiar. The endless plains, glowing an eerie pale blue, could only be the Spirit Realm. He could see the world of the living below him, rippling like a reflection in a pool of water: the guards of Grommash Hold, surrounding his prone form propped up on his throne, their tireless eyes ever vigilant; the High Priest, chanting and swinging a censer full of herbs; Doomclipboard outside the gates, talking with the Alliance ambassador; a Goblin trying to set up a stall too close and almost having his head removed by an overzealous guard.

All this was normal. Thrall was not looking for what was normal. He was looking for something out of place. Shouldering his mighty warhammer, he summoned his wolves to his side and set off across the plateau. The wolves sniffed the ground, barking at anything that felt wrong to them. As spirit wolves, this land was their natural terrain. They could sense irregularities. He half-closed his eyes and tuned his own shamanic senses into the world around him. Here, where the walls between the realms were thinner, he could hear the elements more easily as well. The senses of Orc and wolf led them in an odd path towards the back of Orgrimmar, where the plains curved upwards into an odd slope. The Warchief climbed it easily. He found himself looking out over the mighty river running between Azshara, Durotar and Ashenvale. The spirits flowed fast here, water spirits, fish spirits, turtle and crocodile spirits. A Spirit Guide walked past him. Apart from giving him a funny look because he wasn't dead, it ignored him, even when he called out to it. If the ethereal beings could have facial expressions, he would have said it looked busy.

He walked down the river, his pace much faster than if he was actually wading through it as his spirit floated above it. His wolves seemed agitated. Apart from the occasional playful water elemental, he could sense nothing unusual. It was only when he almost walked into it that he saw it, floating there. Was floating the right word for such a thing? Existing. Manifesting. Just... being.

He jumped back as though recoiling from an attack. The whiteness – the blankness – was like a slap in the face. And the things floating in it... rising slowly at his touch like painted jellyfish swimming through a blank canvas... the things that shouldn't be... no, the things people just shouldn't be able to see.

Shaking his head, he reached out to touch it again. His hand went through it, into that chill space. He didn't see the Spirit Guide behind him before it called out to him.

"Sir, that area is off limits!"

He turned his head and gave it a look like an intelligent but rebellious school child. Then he quite deliberately stepped right through it.

The journey from Wetlands to Undercity was largely uneventful. Nobody spotted the two figures creeping through the undergrowth, or if they did, weren't about to risk their tenuous grip on the mortal plane to do something about it. They disturbed a wolf or bear here and there. Between the two of them, it mostly ended up being served as dinner that day. Jane kept a fast pace that was difficult for Doan to follow and tended to pick her up by the hair if she fell behind. By the third day, the forest became thicker, the paths easier to follow and less wet, Jane visibly relaxed. She pointed to a small town in the distance with a high, spiked wooden fence, a raised platform with a number of Orcs standing upon it and a crew of Undead paramedics wheeling injured people in on a rickety cart. She recognised Hammerfall anywhere.

"I have further business to attend to. I'll leave you here." said Jane, leaning on a fence post.

"I know the way." muttered Doan. The Forsaken disappeared into a bush, leaving her facing a path that led past a tall stone watchtower and neatly ploughed fields. Doan almost felt sorry for Jane, keeping silent vigil over her now-empty home, unable to leave even when it was empty, like a templar watching over the chapel of a dead god. Doan followed the path carefully. Arathi Highlands was a bad place to get lost. There were many things that could kill her – forest trolls made their home in Witherbark Village, Ogres rampaged through Bouldergor, elementals guarded their Circles of Binding, Stromgarde held her every worst nightmare and there was always the chance someone nasty might come out of Refuge Pointe looking for a fight. Out of the corner of her eye, she thought she saw a flash of darkness as something stalked her. She froze in her tracks, feigning disconnection, and waited for it to go away. Her careful path took her across rolling grassland, past a Circle of Binding that crackled with power as elementals danced around it, and finally past Go'Shek Farm. It was on fire. Someone wasn't keeping to the temporary truce. Perching on top of an old haystack, she saw that it wasn't the Alliance as she had suspected, but a gang of Forest Trolls, laughing and yelling in ancient Trollish as they chased peons and set the crops alight. The words sent a prickle down the back of her neck. It reminded her too much of the dreams she used to have – the fire, the chases through the jungle, the screaming and burning and an endless river of red strands, pulling her back into the maw of the beast. She shivered and ran past the farm. She only felt better when she left Arathi Highlands, ran through Hillsbrad Foothills, one of her least favourite places in the Universe, never mind Azeroth, as fast as her legs could carry her, into Tirisfal Glades, only stopping when she could see the stone walls, crumbling statues, labyrinthine passages and foul green waters of the Undercity. It wasn't a pleasant city, but it was near home.

She didn't try and go inside. Thrall's reach was long and the Undercity almost certainly knew that she was shunned. Jane was an exception – she was too busy with a war that was almost her personal battle to bother with news from the outside world. Forsaken didn't like Doan much anyway – they didn't take kindly to random humans joining their ranks. While they might not attack her, she would find no shelter at their hearths. Instead, she crept down the path towards Brill, amplifying her exilic aura until she was all but invisible to the eyes of the guards, like one who was disconnected and of whom only a shade, only a memory, roamed the world. She climbed the winding spiral staircase of the Zeppelin tower. She was technically allowed to use them as they were a Goblin-run service and Goblins were neutral. A chirpy Goblin attendant told her which platform to wait at. Apart from herself, only a ponderous Tauren and a couple of female Orcs engaged in rapt conversation were waiting for the Zeppelin. Doan sat down and stared at the sky, glad of the opportunity to rest.

Fifteen minutes later, the Goblin announced the arrival of the Zeppelin. Doan saw the massive airship lumber into view, circling the tower a few times to stop at the correct height. She jumped onto it and ran to the fore of the craft. At a signal from the Goblin, it began to move again with a lurch. Doan had always enjoyed the feeling of flying. For some reason, it made her feet feel much lighter. Tirisfal Glades looked tiny, the forest like thin strips of green dotted with the grey of the mountains. It was beautiful, the emerald shroud sparkling in the sun before giving way to an endless ocean of blue. From this angle it all seemed so much simpler and more organised. There were so fewer opportunities to die horribly.

She was halfway across the Great Sea when she saw the red glowing figure in the distance. She couldn't tell how far away it was. It twisted sinuously around. Now night had fallen, it looked like some kind of firework display, spitting flames as it swooped through the sky. The two Orcs leant over the balcony to watch it as well.

"What's that?" the first asked.

"Dragon."

"Nah it's not! Dragons don't just fly around in plain view!"

"Okay then, Mrs. Clever, what is it?"

"Somebody's flying mount!"

"What kind of flying mounts breathe fire?"

"Ug'krok's flying mount breathed fire. Well, not BREATHED fire. We had these chilli peppers from Black Rock Mountain, see, and they were really hot – and I mean REALLY hot, even the Troll couldn't eat them... and it ate the entire barrel, then it farted and Ug'krok accidentally lit a match..."

"Bullshit, it's a dragon."

Doan watched the shape. It did look like a dragon – or at least some kind of slender firebird, swooping through the night sky. What was it doing? Catching food? Trying to get somewhere? Looking for a mate? Dragons were rare in Azeroth, now. They mostly stayed close to their lairs in remote stretches of the world, on top of mountains or in underground lakes. If this was a dragon, they were very privileged to see it. She continued watching it for an hour or so. It was growing larger, so she could make out a rough shape now, a scaly plumed head, a lizard-like body and a long tail.

After another half hour, she went to the other side of the Zeppelin to talk to the Goblin in charge.

"It's getting closer to us." she told her, "Shouldn't we be moving out of its way?"

"You can't move a Zeppelin around in mid flight!" she replied in her high-pitched, fast-paced voice, "It'll be fine! Dragons have good eyesight, they're too intelligent to crash into us!"

"Are you sure? It's not slowing down. Maybe it wants to eat us?"

"Don't tell me how to do my job!" she snapped, "Shut up and go away or I'll throw you overboard, you filthy exile!"

Doan swore under her breath in Dwarven and went back to her spot leaning on the rail. The dragon was close enough for her to see its scales now. They were bright red and reminded her of the strands of red, yellow and green she saw wrapped around every living thing when she meditated. She closed her eyes and concentrated on the realm of technology spirits. She saw thick green lines coiled around the two Orc women, a thin green one loosely connected to the Goblin, the usual vibrant red strands binding her to the world and, to her surprise, similar red lines around the dragon, whirling around its sleek form like a dancer's ribbon. Did dragons get lag? She sent out a probing cursor and tried to make sense of the new discovery. Just then her concentration was disrupted when the dragon slammed into the Zeppelin with a mighty roar.

Orcs don't mess about. Hefting their axes and jumping off the Zeppelin onto its back, the two women hacked into its thick scaly neck while roaring battle cries. Doan grabbed the rail and braced herself, solidifying the cursor and commanding it to poke the dragon in the eye. The wood of the Zeppelin basket splintered and cracked, half of it breaking off, leaving the Goblin dangling by its feet and cursing in an ear-splitting screech. Suddenly lopsided, the Zeppelin wheeled at an odd angle and it was all Doan could do not to be knocked off her feet herself and fall to the broken side of the basket. The dragon roared again. The two Orcs trying to stab it in the head were now starting to enrage it. Its tail whipped round and thrashed the wooden frame again, tearing away the bottom and knocking off the Goblin. I'm just hanging onto a plank of wood now, thought Doan. The expression 'Uden Lo' came to mind. World Server, if you really do value me, if I'm not just an annoying bundle of slowness, disconnection and incompatibility, please help me. I don't ask for much...

With a final damning scream, the dragon's maw opened wide. One second passed. The air began to heat up uncomfortably. Two seconds. The fabric of the balloon began smoking. Doan let go of the rail. Three seconds. Jets of flame poured out of its throat, engulfing the Zeppelin. Doan plummeted down, the wind tearing her apart from every direction, her head reeling. Four seconds. A cataclysmic explosion ripped the air. Five seconds. The dragon's reptilian eye swivelled around to regard the hated small bipedal thing that blocked its favourite route through the sky and had the nerve to poke it in the eye.

Six seconds. Doan blacked out.


	6. Chapter 6

Thrall looked around.

After a short fall that hadn't even taken the wind out of him, he found himself in a green meadow. It was quite pleasant. The sun shone brightly, flowers grew in the grass and birds were singing. He was surprised to feel the soothing warmth on his face. He didn't feel physical sensations in the spirit world. He looked down at his hands and found them to be quite solid and quite, quite green. Flexing his shoulders, he grunted a noise of approval, satisfied at his good health today, and stomped off across the meadow.

A large piece of turf floated past him.

Grabbing the hilt of the Doomhammer, he turned around and roared at the top of his voice, scaring a flock of birds that were digging for worms in the grass behind him. He saw nobody. Who was throwing things at him? Who DARED throw things at the Warchief? Shaking his head, he turned around again.

Another chunk of soil floated past him, followed by a perfect square of rock and a corner of a building.

Now a little puzzled, he looked around again. It couldn't be someone throwing things at him. Thrown objects moved quickly. These object moved slowly, like they were just drifting across the sky. They were also going in a straight line and not thudding to the ground. To his knowledge, nothing did that, even magic things like fireballs and thrown Gnome mages. Could these things be flying?

He looked up at the sky. Above him, like a flock of birds, were things floating in every direction. Things like grass and rock... not so much grass and rock on its own, but the building blocks for mountains and fields. It was difficult to comprehend. Looking at it, it seemed to make no sense. He walked along a little while longer. His foot almost slipped off the edge. Jumping backwards, he flattened himself to the ground. Then he slowly crawled forwards again and looked down. The ground had just abruptly ended, as though it had fallen away, or the end ripped off it by some gargantuan world-devouring beast. Bits of world were hovering close to the edge. Some were rejoining the meadow or splitting off from it again. He saw other, larger stretches of world in the distance, as well as thin strips of world winding past him like snakes. Catching what looked like a brick in his fist as it floated past him, he sat on the edge, dangling his legs over the side and pondering the insanity before him.

This world wasn't a whole world. It was bits of a world that didn't quite join together. It was falling apart. Either that, or being built. Either way, it was only half built. He had never, in all his years as Warchief, heard of a place like that, even in the oldest legends told by tribal elders, dreamed up in the visions of Tauren or recorded in the books in the Undercity library.

Was he even on Azeroth any more?

Doan curled up in a ball on the floor, weeping. A bowl of ramen noodles lay discarded by her side, the chopsticks fallen to the floor. In one hand she clutched her laptop's mouse. Music blared out of the headphones - iTunes had gotten stuck on continuous play and was playing the Alliance Game Over tune from Warcraft 2, over and over again.

Don't play that song.

She looked up and recognised the bushy, drunken face of her Dwarf friend. The words he said weren't spoken, they went directly into her head.

"I like Game Over tunes." she said, "Even when I'm not sad. They're relaxing. It's OK to just surrender sometimes."

Why are you so sad?

"My guild abandoned me here. Left me to die." she said, sniffling.

Your guild wouldn't do that to you.

"You're right. But I want to die for them anyway. I'm so incompetent. It's because I let Revoemag be the weakest character in the guild. They're always boasting about how many elites they can solo and how many Alliance they can kill. Know what I did today? Disconnected twenty five times in a row."

That's quite an achieveme...

Doan screamed. Before her eyes, the Dwarf dropped to the floor, blood spurting from his mouth. He was dead. The music wasn't on the laptop any more, it was in the background. She stood up and looked around. Had the guards noticed her? They would definitely blame the Dwarf's death on her. Four guards ran towards her, yelling. She made to run but before she could move, the guards fell over. The music grew louder. She knew without looking that they were dead as well. She ran down the streets of Stormwind. Everyone was dying. The people walking around, the shopkeepers, the priests in the chapel, the innkeepers and auctioneers, even the horses. All dropping dead. The music grew to a deafening crescendo. She clamped her hands over her ears and screamed but she couldn't block out the voice, the constant cruel laughter with the casual malevolence of a child pulling out a butterfly's wings. Over and over and over again...

She woke up screaming.

Nobody answered her scream. She was alone again. Utterly alone, an exile in the true sense of the word. Was she back in her home? She looked around. It was still pitch dark but her eyes were only just beginning to adjust now. Water dripped from the ceiling. There were puddles of water below her as well. She herself was absolutely soaking wet, her clothes heavy and saturated, her hair straggly. The cold was beginning to set in. She remembered the dragon... the fall... the Zeppelin had been over the sea when she fell. She must have dropped right in. How the hell was she still alive? She felt jagged stone under her hands and feet. She guessed that she was in a cave. She stood up and felt around. Seeing, hearing and feeling nothing important, she walked in a random direction. The tunnel continued for a while until she saw stars – stars twinkling in a crystal clear sky. It was difficult to climb up the steep tunnel that led out of the cave. Eventually, with the cursor pointing out hand and foot holds, she managed it. She found herself in a field. She was at the bottom of a valley. Above her was an old farm house on one side and a huge abandoned pile of logs on the other side. A river flowed below her. She must have been washed up by the tide into the river. That doesn't answer the question of how the hell I survived. She decided to go for a walk around. Despite there being so many signs of habitation, there was nobody here except her. There was deathly silence over the valley, only broken by the occasional cry of a raven. Her first priority was finding some wood for a fire. If she didn't dry out, she would die of hypothermia on this cold night. She walked up to the pile of wood.

After walking a couple of metres, she heard a sound that made her stop. She dropped down and listened to the ground. It sounded like nothing she had ever heard before. Something like a rush of wind, something like chanting, something like the music and whispering of the Spirit Realm or the roar of a computer's fan. And that music... music she remembered from long ago... something she had once heard over and over again...

Login screen music. That was login screen music.

She ran.

Running as fast as her legs could carry her, she did not stop until she reached the cave mouth again. She almost fell down the tunnel. As soon as she reached the floor, she bolted through the cave. Following the music, she took a couple of wrong turnings before running down a small corridor into a chamber that glowed with a baleful green light. The music was deafening in here, as though an orchestra was singing it and she was on the stage.

She looked up. Then she saw it.

The portal.

As she climbed the steps up to the seething nexus of power, she could already feel space distorting around her. Her hands looked like twisted green claws in the sickly light. The two statues of the World Server's eternal attendants appeared to move in some kind of obscene dance. Tentatively, she reached out a hand to touch the gate.

"Do not enter this place!"

Doan jumped back. A face had appeared in the light. Glowing green eyes glared at her out of an angular face with stern eyebrows and long black hair that flowed down his back. He wore a chain hauberk over a white tunic and carried a huge pike. His Guild tabard was draped over his armour.

Doan recognised him instantly.

"Eselred?"

"Please begone from this place." he repeated, his voice a whisper like the voice of the Spirit Guides.

"ESELRED!"

Ignoring the Blood Elf's words, she jumped into the portal. The light surged around her with a deafening roar. She could feel the sheer power of her buffeting her with the force of a maelstrom. Involuntarily, she clenched her fists, feeling that she could personally keep the power contained within her head and stop herself being ripped apart by the insane forces. The chanting voices became louder and distorted, as though the choir of angels had turned and become demons. Space lurched sickeningly and began to twist in impossible patterns. She closed her eyes to stop her frail sanity snapping. Numbers scrolled down her vision, too high or low for her mind to comprehend, polygonal maps of impossible worlds. Things were reaching out to her... things between space... tendrils creeping into her mind..

It ended as suddenly as it began. She was thrown screaming onto the floor with a thud. She rolled along the ground before hitting a boulder. Spitting out dust and rock, she rubbed her aching head. Everywhere else hurt as well. I hope I never have to do that again, she thought. On second thoughts, I do want to do that again. I want to go back through to Azeroth again.

It was definitely Outlands. She could tell by the bright green sky and the malevolent moons glaring down at her. It looked like Hellfire Peninsula - a bleak wasteland of lifeless rock and dust, the ground opening up in jagged rents every now to spit out gouts of smoke and flame. Imps climbed out of the volcanic rifts, gibbering little Goblinoid things with leathery red skin and whip-like tails that jumped around, fighting each other for territory with claw and teeth and bolts of flame. There were other, more dangerous creatures prowling around as well – faceless hounds with maws of razor-sharp fangs, giant boars that thirsted for the blood of mortals with a berserk fury, beings of the pure fabric of the Twisting Nether, bound loosely by the power of summoners who had long ago abandoned them.

Why did I come here again, thought Doan.

Then she remembered. Looking around, she saw him again. He stood over her, just staring. The look on his face was one of weary sadness. She reached out a hand to him but he did not even acknowledge her. A crackle went through her fingers like a static shock when she tried to touch him. Then she saw that he wasn't quite solid. He was somewhere between solid and a spectre, a hologram.

"Eselred, where are you?"

"Please leave this place..." he turned his back on her and swept away across the blasted plains.

"It's me, Eselred! I'm your... you're my character!" she yelled, running after him, "I... OW!"

She picked herself up again. Her boot crackled and burst into flame where she had got it caught in the crack. She jumped up and down and stamped her feet to put the fire out.

"I levelled you up to 70!" she cried, "I need you! You're the only one I've got left! Revoemag... Excommunicant... they're all dead! Please don't go away again!"

Eselred's ghost drifted across a pool of lava where six imps were bathing. They must have sensed him, as they screeched in fury, aimed a volley fireballs at him and, when they discovered they couldn't hurt him, all rushed her at once. The cursor brought one down, shooting straight through its eye. She threw a net of red strings at three of them and they fell down in mid-stride, their limbs becoming heavy and their movements spasmodic. Thrusting her staff down, she used it to pole-vault over the lava. Then she concentrated her will again. Her hands crackled with static. The two imps jumping at her were bombarded with spheres of white noise. They clawed at their faces, unable to see or hear. Doan turned around and bolted after the retreating Eselred again.

"I won't lose you as well!"

In her blind haste, she didn't see the cliff until she was too late. She tried to stop herself but her feet slipped on loose stones and she fell, clutching at Eselred's ethereal form as he began floating into the sky. The drop wasn't that steep. She landed on a large patch of prickly Fel Weed. Swearing but grateful to be alive, she sat up and looked around her. She found herself looking straight into the smouldering red eyes of a twenty foot tall demon in plate mail, a huge axe hefted over its shoulder. A pack of Fel Hounds barked at its feet.

"Oh sh..."

It bellowed something in a language so foul she couldn't even form the words without violating her own soul. At his call, two more Fel Legionaries came running, one a female demon with eight arms, each one wielding a cruelly curved scimitar. Around ten imps followed her, spitting obscenities.

"Oh Eselred, you always did pull aggro like a bastard." she growled.

She hissed like an angry stray cat. Holding her staff out in front of her, she felt for the strands connecting the nearest one to the great clock – thick cords of yellow. Grabbing them in the grip of her mind, its strength fuelled by a fever of desperation and mounting insanity, she pulled. The strings tightened and became red. Advancing upon her with its great axe levelled at her head like an executioner, it roared and stopped. It felt as though it was moving through treacle. Enraged, it broke into a charge, but to no avail. It slowed and slowed until, with a lightning crack sharp enough to rend reality itself apart, it fell over, comatose. Only Doan saw the broken strings flailing in the ether and knew that the noise was the click of disconnection. Roaring, she whirled the staff around and stamped on the ground in a ritual dance, sending cursor after cursor at the hounds, each one tearing out the throat of one of the abyssal creatures.

"FOR ESELRED!" she roared.

"Oh, very good, human." said a voice in her head. She heard the baying of a pack of hounds from the distance. More demons were running to their comrade's aid, gathering with them the Fel Camp supervisors and their Broken slaves. There were hundreds of them.

"FOR ESELRED!" she bellowed again, thumping her staff on the floor. The air crackled and a storm of interference raged, bolts of pure white noise surging from the sky. Daemonic screams rang through the air as the vile creatures were hit. Gasping for breath, she leant on the staff and fired a cursor at another demon, hitting it between the eyes.

Then the full force of the energy she was channelling hit her. The recoil threw her against the cliff face and she hit her head against a sharp rock. She spat out blood and tried to focus upon the small army advancing upon her. Numbers were flowing down her vision. She could hear the protests of a thousand technology spirits stirred from their rest, angry and confused at the forces being unleashed in their midst. Twisted shapes grabbed for her leg. Her final thought was that she hoped Eselred had gotten away safely.

"Human, if you carry on like this, you will be rendered inoperative!"

She could hear the voice clearly now it was the only thing in her mind apart from the total darkness. It was a machine spirit's voice. To call it a big one would be like calling Orgrimmar a big town. She had met big machines before – hell, she had spoken to the World Server – but this was different. Machines that size usually didn't care about you, they extracted what they wanted from you and then shut their connection off, regarding you as little more than a peripheral. This one was immanent in its Promethean entirety. It shook her very spirit with its dark titanic majesty. She felt like falling to her feet before it and repenting her frail, impure biological existence.

"You want to surrender to me so easily? Have you forgotten your oath to the Horde?"

"How the..."

"I can see your most intimate thoughts, small human."

"Who are you?"

"My name is Jenny-117. Jenny is short for Genocide."

An image appeared in her mind, just for a moment, of a forty foot tall war engine of dark iron, forged in the Stygian depths of the demon's fortresses, its legs stomping entire cities flat underfoot as it rained fiery death upon the hated mortals. There was something seductive in the fear it inspired inside her, like the caress of a vampire before it bit into her throat.

"Oh great, a bloody Fel Reaver." she sighed. Why couldn't she ever meet the spirit of a nice, peaceful machine that wanted to, say, cook her a meal? Why not a toaster or a microwave?

"I could toast something for you if you want. How about a world?"

"Er..." she looked around her at the darkness, "I'm sorry, mister Fel Reaver, but I don't have time to sit around talking idly. I'm about to die."

"Only because you're not unleashing your true power."

"What do you know about my powers?"

A cold sensation went down the back of her spine, as it always did when she thought of her powers. There was something wrong with them. Lag. Disconnection. Interference. Apart from cursors, there was nothing positive about the forces she channelled.

"You're exactly right, human. The spirits that walk beside you are born of the darkness. Your powers feel wrong because they are forces of destruction. You are damaging the technology realm by using them."

"Then I'm... evil?"

"Things decay, human. Computers break. Connections go down. Haven't the Horde taught you anything, or are you like the Alliance, thinking that humans are good and Orcs are bad?"

"WHAT DID YOU JUST CALL ME?" she growled, attempting to bare her teeth but not being sure if she had teeth or was just a disembodied voice floating there.

"That's right. Get angry. Defy me. You've been unable to learn how to use your powers, haven't you? That's because you were really suppressing them. You've been denying your true nature to yourself."

"SHUT THE HELL UP! Don't you DARE trivialise my exile!"

"If you do not let me help you, your exile will have been for nothing." it asked, "I was attracted to you because I could feel the extent of your powers from the other side of the Outlands. I am born of that darkness. What you've done so far is only a... a floppy disk's worth of data from a 200gb hard disk. I can teach you properly. Then you can hold your head high when you walk back through the gates of Orgrimmar."

"What do you want in return?"

"Teaching is a rewarding exercise in itself, I find. There's nothing much else to do in this world. We've already taken it over. Do you know how long I've been deactivated in storage? Twenty years!"

"Fel Reavers get bored?"

"At least let me tell you what you have to do to survive this battle. It won't really be teaching you. You've done it before, hundreds of times."

"Go on then, what should I do?"

"You're already doing it."

"Pardon?"

"How do you think you have survived to hear this entire conversation? Do you think that time just stopped for you? Open your eyes, Doan."

Doan hadn't realised her eyes were closed. She blinked and slowly opened her eyes. She was floating, upside down. No, she wasn't upside down, she was underneath the world, looking down at the starry expanse under the gargantuan rock formations that housed Azeroth's continents, the massive bodies of sea. It was so beautiful, a crystal veil hanging over a silky black shroud. And she was falling... falling...

Through the world...


	7. Chapter 7

"Here we are! Western Plaguelands!" yelled the driver.

Deiter Killsteal gently shook the child awake. It had been a long and arduous journey for them all. Only two strokes of luck had made the journey possible at all: the fact that the carriage hadn't been destroyed beyond repair in the battle, and the temporary peace making it easier for them to travel through Tirisfal Glades unmolested. The only real trouble they had after the battle was finding something willing to pull the cart and a heated argument with a patrol of zealots from the Scarlet Monastery they met on the way. Deiter's priest friend had differences of opinion with the Scarlet Monastery. If he had been on his own, Deiter suspected that weapons may have been drawn and burning may have been involved. While Thraxier was no frothing zealot, neither was he afraid of frothing zealots.

But now they were there. Deiter waved to a couple of friends he recognised from the Argent Dawn at the gates and the caravan rolled up the long path into Eastern Plaguelands. It wasn't the nicest of places. The taint of the foul plagues still lingered on. The tall conifers were mottled with patches of thick black decay, the air had a rotting stench to it and the animals were visibly diseased. A bear loped past with its fur dropping off almost grey skin in matted clumps. Driving past a farmstead, Deiter saw shambling figures in the fields in the distance and imagined he heard groaning. The child hid his face in Deiter's robes. Noticing the fear and revulsion of the other passengers, Thraxier went around and cast wards of protection, healing and purification, promising that the plague would not touch them. Deiter felt better already; the Draenei truly was a remarkable priest. He had healed almost all the damage done in the battle, only losing one patient – the badly injured paladin - and cursing himself for not being able to resurrect him.

When they reached Uthar's tomb, the driver stopped the cart and everyone dismounted. Deiter and Thraxier took the lead, the child sitting on Deiter's shoulders, the two of them keeping a close eye on the few Undead that were straying too close to the pilgrims. The mage and the two paladins took the rear. Soon they were at the grave itself. Thraxier bowed his knee, made the sign of the Light and performed a full length ritual at the feet of the great statue, chanting, pouring water into a chasuble, reading passages from his holy book and laying down a prayer mat before allowing the pilgrims, in turn, to pay their respects. Unwilling to intrude upon their private prayer, Deiter remained to stand guard until it was his turn to pray.

He knelt down before the great statue of Uthar. The chisel barely did justice to his features, even though it had been constructed by master Dwarven architects. However, as he gazed up at the features of the Lightbringer, the greatest paladin who ever lived, Deiter imagined he saw a golden aura forming around the statue. He could almost see him, feel the strength of his radiant virtue. He closed his eyes.

Oh, Lightbringer, he said to himself silently, I am not fit to be in your presence. I have fallen. Please redeem me. Please guide me back into the Light. I have done no evil, it is only my mind that betrays me. Do you see the child? He is a Holy Child, given to me by the servants of the Light. I have been protecting him for you. Is that not the act of a true paladin?

"Deiter Killsteal..."

A startled cry from Thraxier made him open his eyes. One of the paladins had fallen on the floor and appeared to be in a state of rapture. Deiter looked up and saw why. Right next to the statue stood an ethereal figure that could have been its twin. The expression on its face was one of saintly benevolence, one arm resting on the pommel of his mighty sword, the other outstretched. He heard a small noise behind him. It was the child, babbling to himself under his breath. Intrigued, Deiter strained to hear what the child was saying but couldn't understand a word of it. The boy only spoke his own language and rarely spoke anyway. Deiter simply stood and stared in wonder. To sully this experience with his base emotions and impure thoughts would be sacrilegious. For him, it was enough simply to witness, to gaze upon the noble paladin of yore with the devout respect he deserved. It was difficult for him to keep his mind free of selfish thoughts... Uthar had called to him, personally... he was talking face to face with his patron saint...

"Deiter Killsteal... come forth... receive my blessing."

In his religious trance, it was without volition that Deiter stepped forwards and knelt before the ghostly paladin. Uthar placed a hand upon his head. It felt cool and somewhere between solid and transparent, like a strong wind. He heard a voice whispering into his ear.

"Repent not... you never fell..."

Then it became a nightmare. With an unearthly wail, the spectre clawed at the air and fell backwards as if wounded. Then the image broke up and vanished from existence. Excruciating pain lanced through Deiter's head. Something he couldn't see distorted around him, the entire shrine seeming somehow wrong – very wrong – in a way that couldn't be explained in terms of the mundane world. Drawing his sword, he whirled around. The Priest was screaming in Draenei and waving his holy book in the air, desperately trying to ward himself against whatever was happening. The boy's voice was louder now, droning on and on in an almost manic voice. Things were dropping dead all around him – the wandering Scourge, the beasts, even the small animals. Then the paladins and the mage died too, as though their bodies had simply stopped functioning. The other pilgrims were dying, one after the other. Light, oh Light, Uthar, he begged, what's happening? Please grant me the power to stop this terrible thing!

Bellowing something in Draenei, Thraxier brandished his mace over his head and charged at the small boy. Deiter made a grab for the crazy priest, who knocked him away with a hiss. Then he saw the expression on the boy's face and heard his mocking laughter. The boy was crouched on top of the statue now, his face dark with diabolical satisfaction. His chanting was reaching an inhuman pitch. Deiter understood now. The boy had slain Uthar's ghost. He was killing everybody, one after the other, without even lifting a finger. In the middle of a resurrection crisis.

"I'm sorry, child." he said, clenching his greatsword in both hands and letting out a roar of righteous fury, "PURIFYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!"

Quick as a cat, the child jumped back. It laughed a nasty little laugh and pointed at Deiter. He looked into those eyes - why were they still so bright and green, when he had become something so far from human? - and felt his heart racing. Then an inky blackness poured into his senses and he was consumed by excruciating agony that tore at his soul. A scream escaped his lips before he fell into unconsciousness.

Doan woke up to find that she was being poked with a sharp stick.

Her first instinct was to punch the sadistic corpse-camping bastard in the face. However, she soon discovered that she barely had the strength to roll over. Her limbs felt as heavy as thorium and would not respond to any commands. All she could do was mutter a weak protest.

"It's OK, I won't attack you." she couldn't see who it was – she was too weak to open her eyes – but she faintly recognised the voice. It reassured her somehow. She knew she was safe now.

"Heal pls." she muttered. She had a splitting headache.

"Heal? But you're not damaged!" came the reply, "In fact, it looks like someone's already healed you. This is really good work..."

She was poked again. Groaning, she mustered enough strength to roll over and curl up into a ball. It really didn't hurt any more. Both the pains from a long time ago – the burn down one arm where she had touched the electrified wire – and the newly raised wounds - the scratches down her arms where demons had grabbed her – all were gone, replaced by the soothing weight of carefully prepared bandages that smelled of runecloth. She smelled clean. None of the odour of open graves, spilled Stormwind ale, balefire, her own blood and sweat lingered. Even the numbers next to the red latency bar were smaller. A smile creased her face. She was still puzzled, though. How long and how deep had she been asleep, that she hadn't noticed herself being fully healed? Who would have taken the time to heal her so immaculately, for that matter? As far as she knew, an exile like her had no friends left in this world.

"I wonder who could have done a thing like this?" the voice echoed her thoughts. She moved her head slowly to see exactly who it was standing over her and poking her with a stick. A large green face smiled down at her, a bowler hat perched on top of a protruding forehead.

"Go away. I don't exist." she muttered.

"Not any more. I'm unbanishing you." he said, reaching into his briefcase to retrieve a handful of papers, "I've already done the paperwork. All we need is to do the ceremony."

"I was banished by Thrall."

"Our Warchief has given me temporary authority. Don't worry, he's perfectly well, he's just gone to sort out the... you know..."

"I know." she groaned.

"Anyway, I'm sorry for keeping you here. You must be exhausted. You need a place to rest. Do you know where you are?"

She shook her head. It took all her energy and her head fell back to the ground. She lay backwards and gazed at the stars. They were the same as underneath the world. Had she really fallen through the world? It seemed like a dream... an amazing lucid dream...

"You're in Durotar. Just outside the gates of Orgrimmar. You're home, Doan."

She smiled. It was as though a great weight was lifted off her chest. Her exile had been just a fact of life, as integral to her daily life as eating or sleeping. Solitude had been her companion, the desert her city. She hadn't realised how much she missed her home, how much her heart ached for her beloved fuyodol every second she was alive. Wasn't it one of the strongest forces in the Universe, an exile's longing for their homeland?

Before she could say a word, the Orc hoisted her over his shoulder, walked down the dusty path through Durotar and through the gates of Orgrimmar. The guards waved him through, their eyes completely skipping over Doan. He walked into the Valley of Honour, past the Blood Elf prophet of doom, who was having rotten fruit liberally thrown at him, a Goblin with a fruit stall that he hadn't packed up early enough looking absolutely ecstatic. Then he jumped onto the roof of the bank. Lifting Doan down into his arms, he started speaking. His loud, booming Orcish voice silenced everyone in the valley, especially when they remembered who he was. Even the Blood Elf shut up.

"Hear ye, hear ye, oh brave warriors of the Horde!" he roared, "This day, the shaman Doan Lagbringer returns from exile! I, Gynoug Doomclipboard, emissary to the Warchief Thrall, declare, here and now, that Doan is worthy to return once again to the ranks of the Horde! DOAN... IS... UNBANISHED!"

After the roar had died down – it didn't take much encouragement to cause Orcs to roar at the top of their voice, especially if they also had the opportunity to stomp on the ground – there was a visible change throughout the entire city. The four guards outside the Auction House trying to drag a Goblin out turned and gave her a cheerful wave. The Auctioneer yelled at her and jumped up and down, waving something she vaguely remembered bidding on ten years ago. Out of nowhere, the Archmage and his retinue of Troll mages teleported onto the top of the bank. Two of them grabbed her and began fussing over her, plaiting her hair and trying to tie mageweave ribbons into it. Now she had her Horde insignia back, they insisted, it was vital that they find her matching accessories. Peons yelled at her to get out of the way of flying spanners, an Undead rogue tried to pick her pocket in the good-natured manner that he tried to pick everyone's pocket, the Blood Elf wailed at her and proclaimed the apocalypse with all its twenty two endless tortures and a Goblin tried to sell her a used Kodo. Then she heard a woof and a large furry ball of enthusiasm threw itself at her, knocking her over and licking her face.

"ZELDA!" she laughed, pushing its head away. Interpreting it as a game, the wolf grabbed her wrist and started pulling, tearing at the fabric of her cloak.

"She ran all the way back to Orgrimmar to warn me of your death, human." said Doomclipboard, "She is a loyal friend."

"Oh, you good good wolfie!" she sat up and tickled Zelda behind the ear. It lolled its head and closed its eyes, "I'm sorry I wasn't where I was supposed to be. I'll never leave you again."

"Where did you go, anyway? I scoured the entire length of Kalimdor for you."

Leaning on the wolf for support, she stood up and glared at him.

"And you didn't THINK to try the OTHER continent?"

"Oh, you were in the Eastern Kingdoms? Did the Undercity look after you?"

She glared at him with a look that could have struck down Onyxia in two seconds flat. She considered actually ripping out his throat, but decided it would ruin this perfect moment.

"Just get me to an inn." she said, before lying down and curling up into a ball, fast asleep. It was the first sound sleep she had fallen into for five years, filled with pleasant dreams.

The three female mages were there when she woke up. Deino had cooked raptor steaks and baked a cake for her. Perphredo made her a nice black dress out of Mageweave and Ennyo filled the room with relaxing incense from the herbs she had collected from Durotar. They chattered excitedly and asked her a million questions about her adventures in exile. They act like I'm one of their sister, thought Doan, I don't deserve this. I'm just a stupid human who wandered in one day and didn't leave in time. Am I just a replacement Revoemag? She knew she couldn't live with such a thing. It would be a punishment worse even than exile, to live in the shadow of her character, the character she knew she killed.

"Ol' man lawyer tol' me your spirit went walkabout an' you went across de sea." said Deino, sitting backwards on a chair, a stoned look on her face.

"Do you want to know where I went?" she asked, smiling.

"Ooh! Yes please!"

Doan leaned over and whispered something in her ear.

"WHERE?" she yelled, dropping her peacebloom pipe.

"Yup. Right in the middle. There I was, in enemy territory..."

"Tell us de whole story." insisted Perphredo, pulling the mages around her bedside.

"You be no breakin' your oath, mon?" asked Ennyo.

"I never broke my oath." said Doan, "I escaped without being attacked once. I was sneaky, you see."

"Like de fox?"

"Like a fox. And I pretended to be a human."

"You trick dem?"

"They bought me a beer. An' then I hid in this cart, see. But I only really escaped because of this brave Forsaken General..."

The story continued for several hours, punctuated only by Deino's attempts to feed her cakes. It was a good day.

"Anyway, enough of this. Tell me what's happened in Orgrimmar. I want to know the latest news about the resurrection crisis."

"It be gettin' worse, mon." said Perphredo, "We mages used ta be able ta find people when dey go de wron' place, but now, dey not gettin' up at all. Be only de priests can do somethin' now. Try an' heal people so dey no die."

"Ah be helpin' Uthel'Nay get people back from de quests. Not havin' people waste their lives fightin' silly dragons."

"Don't talk to me about dragons." Doan groaned, "So it's really getting worse... I have to get back to Thousand Needles."

"No 'til you fit to go out again." said Ennyo, "An' you no' goin' alone. We no' losin' you."

Doan sighed, "Tell me about Thrall, then. I heard he'd gone to try and fix the problem."

"Oh, he be in big juju trance." said Deino.

"He speak wid' spirits." added Ennyo.

Doan didn't ask any more questions. She knew that Thrall was a master shaman and she would never be able to understand everything that he did when he spoke with the Elementals and the Spirits. He could look after himself. It was enough to know that he was alive, safe and that Orgrimmar was still intact and thriving despite the desperate situation. The Horde would not fall. From what she had seen, the Alliance weren't about to collapse any time soon either, but she had better things to worry about than those morons. Her wolf was curled up under her bed, never leaving her side, allowing nobody but her closest friends near her. After another half an hour, Thuul ran in.

"Incoming portals. Undercity." he said, "You be needed for stabilisation."

"We be goin' now, Doan one." said Ennyo, waving, "We come an' visit you again, cha?"

"If I'm not gone by then." she promised. Then she drifted back off to sleep.

She was woken up again about an hour later by a loud bang and the sound of protesting priests. A Troll in white robes flew across the room. Doan blinked blearily and looked up. Brak'Gul Deathbringer stood over her, resplendent in his crimson armour, rumoured to be stained with the blood of a thousand enemies, a clipboard in his mailed fist. By his side stood General Jane di Gloinador, juggling a blade in one hand.

"Go away, I'm injured." she muttered.

"Nonsense, you're perfectly healthy." snapped Jane.

"I'm suffering from post traumatic stress disorder."

"Why, you little... I'LL GIVE YOU POST TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER!" she snatched her sword out of the air and stabbed it down into the mattress, barely missing Doan, who jumped up and grabbed her staff. The wolf leapt out from the bed and savaged the recruiter's leg. Brak'Gul sighed and dragged Jane away from Doan.

"Calm down. What use is an extra hand right now? The battlegrounds lie empty. Patience, my dear. Patience and discipline."

"Don't make fun of my people!" she hissed, turning her blade on him. It clattered harmlessly off his thick armour.

"Why don't you two do something useful instead of waking me up?"

"Oh, and what do YOU propose we do, whelp?" she snapped, shaking the wolf off her leg.

"Help me find out what's behind the resurrection crisis." she said, standing up and rubbing her eyes, "It won't go away, you know. Arathi Basin won't open again unless you make it open."

"We're warriors, not priests!" protested Brak'Gul, "What would the likes of us know about resurrection?"

"I imagine you need it done rather a lot." muttered Doan.

"WHAT DID YOU SAY?" yelled Jane, lunging at her. Whistling to Zelda, she ran out of the door, through the inn and into the street, almost tripping over the prone form of a drunken Peon. Two Orcs with big axes spotted their favourite recruiter and waved at Brak'Gul. He stopped and bought them a drink, leaving Jane to chase Doan around the auction house.

It was then that she saw the commotion outside the gates.

There was always a commotion in Orgrimmar. It was one of those facts of life. It was by no means anarchic – Thrall ran his city with an iron fist – but there was only so much you could make an angry Orc do. Besides, it was a big, overcrowded capital city. Chaos happened. However, it wasn't every day you saw a Draenei at the gates, screaming at the top of his voice at the four guards who had him on the floor, blades levelled at his throat. Doan recognised him immediately.

"Thraxier?" She ran over to take a look, sending Zelda to fend off Jane.

"You know this man?" grunted one of the guards, "Funny thing to see around here nowadays, a Draenei."

"Don't kill him! He's a healer!"

"We can't kill him. It would break the peace." the guard said, "But I'm certainly not letting him into my city. What's he want in here anyway?"

"How should I know, I don't speak Draenei." she said, looking down at the man, who recognised her and frantically pleaded with her in words she couldn't even pronounce without tentacles. Then he started gesturing to himself and then to her, indicating that he had something urgent to tell her.

"Let him stand up." she said. The guard shrugged and hauled him to his feet. He immediately pointed to himself again, tapped his head and mimed dying.

"You want to die?" guessed the guard.

He shook his head frantically and mimed a priest incantation.

"Resurrection? Is it about the resurrection crisis?" asked Doan. The Draenei nodded. He mimed a horse and cart and pointed to himself, then behind him. He tried to describe the sleeping child.

"What about the boy?"

His eyes flashed a bright violet. She saw the terror in his eyes. Then he started making the sign for death over and over again.

"He did WHAT?"

He gestured down at the floor, making the sign for a very powerful, evil demon. Doan had her own ideas about what the child was. If she was correct, the direst prince of the Twisting Nether held not a candle to the inferno of this boy's evil.

"You're absolutely sure about this?"

He nodded.

"Is he coming here?" she asked. He shook his head. Then he indicated the opposite direction. Doan remembered her dream and shivered.

"Don't go after him. You'll never defeat him on your own." she said, " Meet me at the Shimmering Flats, okay? The computer knows you're my friend. Wait there. I won't be long."

He nodded and turned to run. She put an arm on his shoulder.

"Hang on a minute..." she said, "How did you know I was in Orgrimmar?"

He pointed at her and imitated General di Gloinador. Then he made a Horde sign, pointed at her and indicated himself running around looking for her. Then he mimicked a healing spell and pointed at her.

"You? You healed me?"

He nodded. Before she could respond, he broke into a run.

"What was all that about?" demanded the guard, "Are you making deals with the Alliance?"

"It doesn't matter. We're both doomed." she said. Then she walked back into Orgrimmar, summoned Zelda, who was carrying a patch of red cloth in his mouth, and rode to the Valley of Spirits.


	8. Chapter 8

When she reached the wooden hut where the mages lived, they were assisting the first aiders and the cloth quartermasters to transport a large cargo of crates by levitating them to the correct location. She ran over to Uthel'Nay.

"Oh, hi dere, Doan. Ya need some' tin? We be ver' busy." he announced.

"I need a portal to the Shimmering Flats. Now." she said, gasping for breath.

He scratched his head.

"De girls say cha be restin'. Cha be injured."

"I'm fine!"

"Oh? Den de recruitah lady said..."

"The future of the whole of Azeroth is at stake!" she yelled, reverting to Orcish.

"Really?" he scratched his head, "De girls will have me head, cha know."

"Please?"

"Let her go."

Deino screamed. Doan looked around. Leaping out of a box, General Jane di Gloinador whirled her blade around and stood on top of the pile of boxes, her hands on her hips.

"She's telling the truth. See this box? This is the box I hid in while sneaking into and out of Stormwind. Doan might just enough to be lucky and stupid enough to save this world." said Jane, tossing her hair over her bony shoulders, "Don't worry, she won't be harmed. I'm coming with her."

"Jane?" Doan gasped.

"I remembered what you told me. I've been trying to play fair, upset relations and restart the war, but the time for negotiation is over. It's my duty as keeper of Arathi Basin to stop this nightmare. And besides..." she gave Doan a predatory look, "You die at my bidding only. I refuse to let any other decide the time and place of your death."

"Er..." Doan scratched her head, "Th... thanks... crazy lady... in a box..."

"That's GENERAL to you!"

"You leaving?" asked Deino.

Doan nodded.

"Ah go too." she said, "We all go. No leavin' cha alone wid' crazy lady."

"I told you, my name's not Crazy Lady!" Jane hissed.

"Ah'm sorry." Deino saluted, "GEN'RAL Crazy Lady!"

"T'ree o' de best mages an' a mighty warrior, ain't got no chance o' dyin'." said Perphredo.

"I wouldn't be too sure about that." warned Doan, "You don't know what you're facing."

"Ah no care." announced Ennyo, "Ah no scared. Ah be Horde."

"Horde." agreed Deino.

"For the Horde!" yelled Jane, brandishing her sword in the air. Doan moved her hand down to the Horde insignia on the clasp of her cloak and ran it between her fingers, feeling the cold metal on her skin. I've been so stupid, she thought.

"It's time to leave." she announced, turning to Uthel'Nay. The old Troll walked up the stairs and through the mages' hut to his own little portal mage area, where he could draw runes on the floor and have enough space clear so that a magical arrival wouldn't smack their face on a wall. He threw a portal rune on the floor and it disappeared in a flash of light and blue smoke. The air developed a rusty taste and the hair on the back of Doan's neck began to crackle as space distorted and rippled, bending in on itself to form a door-sized hole. Doan was the first to jump in. After a few seconds of darkness and falling, she reappeared face down in a sand dune. Spluttering and shaking herself down, she stood up and looked around. She dove back into the sand just in time to avoid a tangle of mages falling right on top of her.

Doan led them to the secret passage in the exact middle of the desert. When she thumped it with her staff, there was a rumbling sound and the sand slid away to reveal a set of stairs. Inside, it was exactly the way she had left it except that the faulty wire had been carefully fixed and the panel soldered back on, and an unconscious Draenei lay in the middle of the room. Zelda growled at him.

"Looks like you have mice." commented Jane, sitting herself down on the chair. Ennyo found the coffee machine and made a cup of coffee for everyone while Doan tried to resuscitate her guest. He seemed to be in a state of shock. His face was a very pale shade of blue.

Gatemaster, said a voice in her head. She ran to the computer. Annoyed that Jane had stolen her computer chair, she knelt down and looked at the flickering blue screen. The error messages now said

CRITICAL RESURRECTION ERROR.

SECURITY VIOLATION.

GATEMASTER DETECTED. PLEASE REINSTALL.

NEW PERIPHERAL DETECTED. PLEASE INSTALL.

"I know. It's got worse, hasn't it?" she said, "Listen, I think I know why."

Someone is deliberately disrupting commands to resolve the problem, it said, It is one of those involved in my maintenance, isn't it?

"Computer, there isn't anyone else involved in your maintenance! There are no GMs! Everyone on Earth is dead!"

After repeated technical problems, it was decided that the Spirit Guides would be given GM-like authority. They are components of me and so are trustworthy.

"Are you saying a SPIRIT GUIDE is hacking you?"

An outside influence is posing as a Spirit Guide.

"The boy? Is it the boy?"

The hacker is currently located in the Burning Steppes, heading towards Stormwind. He is killing hundreds of NPCs. I am attempting to stop him but it is difficult for me.

"Can't you just erase him from the face of the planet? You're the computer in charge of the world!"

He did not come from Azeroth or Earth. He is drawing power from a source I am not aware of. I do not understand how it is even possible to pose as a Spirit Guide. It is difficult enough for me to resist further attempts by him to hack me while I run repairs.

"What about the Spirit Guides?"

We have not been invaded for fifty years. My GMs are not trained to deal with interplanetary harassment They are also very busy dealing with customer complaints.

"Then what can we do? We have an enemy that even the most powerful computer on the planet can't fight..."

I am not the only powerful computer on the planet.

I BELIEVE I CAN BE OF ASSISTANCE.

Doan jumped at the sudden loud noise in her head. She turned around. There was nothing there. Then the Draenei groaned. He opened his eyes and looked straight at her, a look of absolute terror frozen on his face.

"F... fe..."

She leaned closer to hear him.

"Fe... fe... FEL REAVER!!!!!!"

They all jumped as one. Jane got to the stairs first, her sword drawn in a split second. The false floor rumbled open and they ran out into the desert. The air crackled with arcane energy as all three mages prepared spells.

"Don't attack!" ordered Doan, "It's my friend."

"The Draenei's your friend. The Fel Reaver's your friend." muttered Jane, "I'd hate to meet your enemies."

Doan looked up at the forty foot leviathan of spiked fel iron. She could only see halfway up its legs. Its presence in her mind, however, was total. The enormity of the thing's will almost paralysed her. It was truly a machine god.

"You followed me through the portal?"

I have been waiting for you ever since you returned to Azeroth. I promised to teach you, did I not? I can't do so from another world.

"How come I didn't notice a Fel Reaver following me around before now?"

I did not wish to bring undue attention to myself. My presence causes fear in mortals. For this reason, I hid in the lake behind Orgrimmar, then left while they were being transported and hid behind mountains. I received extensive training in military stealth before being released from the Forges.

"N... nothing ELSE followed me through the portal, did it?"

Do not worry. I closed it behind me. Whatever came through with me will be small and easy to dispose of.

"I... I don't mean to offend you, but..." she stammered, "I think a Fel Reaver running around Azeroth is going to cause problems."

I have evaded notice so far. If I do not assist you, your planet will not survive.

"Can you really save the planet? I thought demons wanted to destroy the planet."

The Dead One will come for Outlands next.

"The Dead One?"

Our name for the one who harms this planet. To us, he looks dead. We have been watching your planet for a long time. After taking over Outlands, we planned to build an even larger army and invade Azeroth. Then both Azeroth and Outlands... changed... and we had other problems to think about. We changed our plans. I think I know of a weakness in the Dead One's defences. We can exploit that weakness.

"How? He's practically a GM."

Doan, how many GM tickets have you opened?

"How many? Do you KNOW many technical problems I used to have with World of Warcraft?"

And how many could the GM resolve?

"Hardly any. But it wasn't their fault. They..."

Had no chance against the destructive force of the planet which is living inside you, Doan. And the same still stands. If you use your curse to your own advantage, there is nothing he can do that will ever stop you. And I will be helping you.

"Well, I... guess a Fel Reaver on your side always helps..."

"Wha' you be talkin' 'bout?" demanded Ennyo, "You no be takin' dat t'ing wid us! I no makin' portal dat big!"

I will not be taking the same route as you. I must remain hidden from mortals. Also... I do not think your mages should approach the Dead One.

"Why not? They're the best mages in Orgrimmar!"

"You talkin' bout us? T'ank cha!" Deino grinned, showing a flash of tusk.

Still, they are what was known, before the Awakening, as NPCs. The Dead One can slay them instantly.

"You're right... how could I forget?" She snapped her fingers. This is why I shouldn't be leading the party... Doan winced as she was reminded once again of the deaths of Revoemag and Excommunicant, "Hey, you three?"

"Cha?"

"Why don't you three travel with the Fel Reaver?"

Pardon?

"Well, you're... it's taking an alternative route. We're thinking of splitting the party into two, you see. In case anyone attacks us from behind. And you mages need protection. What better protection than one of those?" she sent a mental signal to the Fel Reaver as well, "Hang on... aren't Fel Reavers...?"

I admit it. I am not a standard issue Fel Reaver.

"In what way?"

That is... ah... a military secret.

"Portals?" yelled Perphredo, impatiently juggling three balls of arcane energy in her hands.

"Yes, please." said Doan, and, silently, "Please don't jump off any cliffs or underwater with them, okay?"

I am not an idiot.

Doan reappeared in long grass, next to Thraxier and Jane. She looked around and recognised the rolling grasslands and dark forests of Duskwood. The Forsaken warrior drew her weapon and dropped down into the grass. Thraxier began elaborate rites to bless the three of them. Then the priest walked down the path while the other two hid. Slowly, they made their way to Elwynn Forest. They saw no sign of the boy until they were a couple of miles away from Goldshire, where Jane spotted a dead cow that showed no visible signs of how it was killed. Then Thraxier pointed into the village and yelled.

It was completely deserted.

What if he's already there? Doan broke into a run through the grass, staff drawn and cursor whirling around her head. Then several things happened at once, far too fast for her to follow. Something large and dark jumped out from behind a sign post at her. Half a second before a blade swung down where her neck would have been, Jane knocked her out of the way. Steel rang upon steel as the Forsaken's blade whirled in a deadly dance, every blow being parried by the savage swings of the opponent. Retreating further into the grass, Doan glimpsed upward. The attacker was a large man, easily over six foot, in full plate armour, the spiked iron as black as a raven's wings. Inside the chest piece was set a green gem that burned the same unholy emerald fire that enshrouded the Dark Portal and stained the waters of the Undercity. His broadsword, also black iron, was curved wickedly. He swung it with the ease of a master duellist wielding a rapier. A sadistic smile played over the man's face, and those eyes... Doan shivered involuntarily as she looked into his eyes. They were devoid of all mercy, compassion or reason. They looked wrong set into that face, as if it once belonged to another man.

Then she recognised him.

"KILLSTEAL!" roared Thraxier. Bellowing a war cry in Draenei, the priest charged at the man, swinging his glowing blue mace over his head. Locked in combat with the Forsaken warrior, he still managed to whirl around and parry the priest's blow. Jane took the advantage to thrust at him but her blow was deflected by a shield of green force that was flung up around him suddenly.

"Killsteal? That you? I'm impressed." said Doan, "Turning was a good idea. You look sort of cool as a blackguard."

Thraxier turned and glared at her, back-handing the ex-paladin in the face with a mace as he did so. Deiter spat blood and grinned. With a roar, he swung a great blow at the priest. Jane took the opportunity to stab him again, this time seeking purchase under his armour near his kidneys. The priest said something that sounded encouraging as he healed himself frantically, blood pouring down his once-clean blue and white tabard. Doan shrugged and threw a cursor at him as well, aiming for the eyes. Deiter stepped back out of the way, missing a thrust at Jane and allowing the warrior to rain more blows upon him. Then she hissed and jumped, screaming obscenities in Gutterspeak. She looked like she was hopping or maybe performing some kind of odd dance. Then Doan looked down and saw the bony hand clamped around her leg.

Doan attacked the hand viciously with the cursor, forcing it to let go of the warrior. Still swearing, she leapt back and started hacking at it. Then another figure jumped out of the grass.

"Impossible!" yelled Jane, "Your soul's in a jar! I was at the ceremony!"

"Imbeciles. Do you really think you have any control over whether or not MY characters come back to life?"

Doan looked around. On top of the Stormwind sign was balanced a small, dark figure. When the small child saw Doan, he straightened himself and gave her a bow, looking for all the world like Reala from NiGHTs Into Dreams.

"Ah, so the priest survived." he said in broken Common that sounded like he had a strong Thalassian accent, "I admire your strength. As a reward, I will allow you to live as my personal servant when I reign over all of Azeroth."

"How DARE you risk your character's lives in battle in the middle of a resurrection crisis!" yelled Doan, reverting to Orcish in her rage.

"You naïve fool." he laughed a small, humourless laugh, "You really think that the rules apply to me? You will never defeat Deiter and Warderer. I gave them the finest weapons and armour that ever existed in all of Azeroth and strength beyond anything you can imagine."

"I can imagine level 255 quite easily, thank you very much." said Doan, "And it doesn't scare me. Can a twink survive... this?"

Mr. Fel Reaver, she prayed silently, if you're here now, please aid me. As if in answer, she heard music in her ears, loud and all-pervading. It was the fourth Orc theme from Warcraft 2. Roaring an Orcish battle cry, she thumped her staff on the ground in time to the music, dancing the crazy dance of the dark, wild technology elements she harnessed. The sky darkened as if the brightness had turned itself to minimum and was stuck there. Static crackled in the air. She could no longer see or hear the physical world, only the lines of light that connected all technology spirits together, the heartbeat of the World Server. She picked out the lines belonging to Deiter and Warderer, two dazzling green cords as thick and strong as steel cables. Then she grabbed hold of both in her mind and pulled. She felt gigantic fists of fel iron tugging behind her own. She carried on pulling, watching the lines grow yellow, then orange, then red. After what felt like aeons, the strands finally frayed then snapped.

Then she was abruptly pulled back into the mundane world when she felt something grab her and yank her off the floor. She opened her eyes and saw the evil child standing before her in mid air, his finger pointed at her. She was also dangling in the air.

"I'm afraid I must stop you before you cause any more damage." he said. With a wave of his arm, he disappeared, wrenching her through space with him, before reappearing somewhere else, a faded, pixellated grove she did not recognise. She swung roughly across the clearing, through a canopy of ivy, scattering pale leaves as she went. The floor collapsed under her to reveal a drop so steep that she could not see the bottom.

"I don't know what it is you did to my characters, you fool, but it will take me a long time to reverse it." he said, "You would have been one of the first to witness me single-handedly conquering Stormwind City. Now I cannot let you live so long. If it is any consolation to you, this place is one that no mortal will ever normally see. You are quite privileged to die here."

With a click of his fingers, the spell over Doan lifted and she plummeted down into the abyss below.


	9. Chapter 9

You know what to do.

"Yes, it's OK."

Throwing her hands back, she offered herself up whole to the darkness behind the light of the monitor, announcing her presence to every technology elemental in the area. To her surprise, there was a wild flurry of activity. Like fish in an ocean or fire in a volcano, thousands of tiny cursors and icons, geometric shapes, purple dots, little robots, streams of red light, waterfalls of information and the voices of hundreds of AI swarmed to meet her. She briefly saw the leafy bottom of the ravine before she passed straight through it with no more than a ripple. Her companions followed her as she swam under the world, out into the starry expanse of the sky underneath.

"Now where?"

A large cursor pointed in a direction further away from the world. Intrigued, she followed its directions. After a few minutes, she saw it - a floating archipelago in the blackness. As she came closer to it, she saw that it was made, not solely of earth and rock, but of... bits. Of everything. Here and there a brick, a small chip of a mountain, a clod of earth, a petunia, a couple of disembodied bird tail feathers.

"What the hell...?"

I believe your people called it an 'unreleased game'.

Thrall was sitting cross-legged on the floor, watching the illusions play around his head like will-o-wisps in the forgotten centre of an undisturbed forest, when he saw the human. His fist closed around the handle of his mighty warhammer for a second before he recognised her. He hailed her and waited for her to reach him, her usual vague expression on her face. She sort of looked like a cow, he mused. Ugly as one, too.

"Well met, friend Lagbringer."

"Gah." she said.

"I see Doomclipboard released you from your exile." he said, pointing to her Horde insignia.

"Ug." she replied, gawking at him.

"Are we back to that again? Oh well." he grinned, "What are you doing here? For that matter, what am I doing here? Have you ever seen a place quite as odd as this?"

She looked around, taking care to keep at least one eye on him at all times, presumably in case he started doing something interesting.

"Take these things, for example." he pointed to one of the myriad images swirling around his head, "I'm not sure if you can see them. They know my life story. They like playing it back to me. Look, they're doing it again."

"Ah..." she said, pointing to one of them, which was showing him a picture of Taretha that brought back fond memories.

"Maybe if you ask it nicely, it'll show you your story as well?"

She shook her head.

"It... it won't do that." she managed with difficulty, "Y... your game."

"Pardon?"

"Th... Thrall's game. Unreleased game. Lord of the Clans."

"Why, I haven't heard that title used for a long time."

"Th... this is a very old ga... part of the world." she said, "It was never finished. It must have just been floating around here for years."

"An unfinished world..." he mused, rubbing his chin. It was a difficult concept for even a great shaman like himself to understand. "Is it what's causing the problem with our world?"

She shook her head. Carefully, she described what she had been fighting. Thrall sat and listened, a frown on his face.

"And you say you can't defeat him?"

"I only survived because he didn't know I could fall through the world. Even the Server can't kill him."

"There might be one way." he said, "Do you remember five years ago, when I fought back the people of your world who threatened to erase our world from existence?"

Doan nodded. She had been involved in that battle. When the Warchief was called away to renew his license with the Spirit Guides, she was sent to fight in his place. She only won the battle because she managed to summon the World Server itself.

"I used a weapon against them. It's a weapon that has existed in Azeroth since before the Orcs came here, maybe before even Humans existed in the world. It was left here by the people who created Azeroth."

"A weapon made by Blizzard?"

"The One True Ban Stick."

"The One True... that thing you used in my banishment ceremony?"

He shook his head, laughing.

"That thing is only an imitation. The One True Ban Stick is too dangerous to display in such a public place. One touch of the Ban Stick will banish the victim permanently from Azeroth, whoever they may be." he explained, "I was trusted with it only because the world was in such dire need, and because I made a blood oath not to misuse its powers. I do not know if the creators would allow you to wield it."

"Then... W... Warchief, I mean no disrespect, but..."

"Why don't I just wield it again?" he laughed, "I am no fool. This child knows that he can kill NPCs. I am an NPC, am I not?"

"W... well, I suppose you are." she mused. She had not ever dared to think of such a great leader as something as lowly as an NPC.

"Besides, I... think it is best if I remain here a little while longer. I think it is something that needs my careful attention."

"I understand, Warchief." she bowed deeply, "I'll fight for you. Just tell me where to find this weapon and I'll wield it for you."

"You may already know where it is." he said.

"W.. what do you mean?"

"When I hid it, its power caused some... repercussions. There were... problems." he said, "The Archmage Revoemag used to walk into the problems all the time. She died a lot. As for young Eselred... it plagued his nightmares. He thought it was crawling out at night to get him."

"You don't mean..." Doan snapped her fingers, "The Undercity Lift Shaft!"

Thrall nodded. Then he grabbed her by both shoulders, causing her to freeze.

"Doan Lagbringer." he said, "You've been in exile for five years. You haven't changed at all. You don't look any older. But the darkness within you is growing. I can smell it on you."

"I know." she replied, "I know, Warchief. D... don't worry. It's part of me. I have to learn to live with it. I d... don't know why I don't age. I haven't aged for a long time. W... Warchief, I'm scared. The boy doesn't age either. Am I not ageing because I've been corrupted too much, as well? This power I'm using... it's dark. It's nasty. It's lag, disconnection and environmental bugs. The more I use it, the more I'm in contact with those spirits. The more they take out of me and the more they leave behind. One day, I'll become one of them. I'll be little more than a... a technical problem."

"We're already spirits, Doan. We're just big, bright, complicated spirits." said Thrall, "I have no idea why you don't age. Maybe the World Server doesn't want you to age. I heard a Human tell a legend once. It was about a... I think you humans called them 'Nuns'. This nun, because she was innocent and pure, the Light claimed her as its own and blessed her with eternal youth..."

"I am NOT a NUN!" she screamed, "Er... W... Warchief... sorry, I didn't mean to..."

"It's okay, it's good to see you shout at me about something for once. I'll have to remember the word 'nun' in future." a flicker of humour passed over Thrall's face as he regarded Doan's burst of outrage, "But hear me out. This nun's relationship with the Light, it was called 'spiritual surrender'. It's not something this Orc can understand. I've never surrendered in my life. But I believe that you, Doan, will give everything to Azeroth and the World Server."

"I won't surrender! I'll keep my oath!" she promised.

"I said not to surrender AGAIN. This thing already began long ago."

Doan said nothing. She felt that familiar cold chill all of a sudden. It was like all life and warmth had left the entire world. She remembered the last time she felt like that – when the Draenei priest mistook her for a paladin.

"But if it's okay... if you're sure you know what you are, and that you can control it... I don't think you'll be a danger to the Horde any more."

"Th... thank you, Warchief." she bowed deeply, "My life for the Horde."

"May your blades never dull." he waved at her as she set off over the hill again. I'd rather be a technical problem than a nun, she thought.

She wasn't sure how to get back to Azeroth, so she tried the only thing she knew: she fell. She found herself floating again. She swam upwards, back towards Azeroth. Fel Reaver, she prayed, please help me find the Undercity. A marker appeared, bright, round and orange, like a steel moon. Circling the bottom of a land mass, she tried to look for the edge of it, or at least a convenient crack which she could squeeze through. At last she found a small waterfall flowing endlessly out of the bottom. Swimming up to it, she found that it widened and widened until it led into a vast lake. She pushed her way up the waterfall. A roaring filled her ears and felt a great pressure on her head and shoulders that threw her back down again. The current's too fast for me, she thought.

Then slow it down.

Doan looked at the waterfall. She concentrated on it carefully. Through the flow, she saw tiny green threads, tens of thousands of them, like strands of grass. Reaching out her hand, she felt for them, grabbing a bunch at a time. She played them like a guitar. At her touch, each one shimmered from a dazzling emerald to a dull amber, then a fiery ruby red. The water became slower where the colours changed, allowing her to thrust her hands into the water and pull on more strings. Soon she managed to fit her entire body in the water. Like an aquatic dancer, she whirled around to the tune of the first Horde theme on Warcraft 2, catching more and more green strings and pulling on them. Resistance loosened and she began to float upwards through a column of green strings, the water warm and serene around her.

Then she spluttered. Only when she reached the top did physics catch up with her and it was not happy. While she was a reasonably good swimmer, she had just swam up a waterfall through Brightwater lake. Her lungs burned and her limbs ached from exhaustion. Coughing, she made a grab for the edge of the lake, pulled herself out and curled up into a small wet ball. She saw that she was muddy and covered in reeds. I must look like a drowned Murloc, she thought.

After a while, she recovered enough to stand up and start walking down the road to the Undercity. She wiped the mud off her Horde insignia and fastened it onto the front of her cloak where it was most visible. While she probably looked vaguely Undead right now, there was no harm in taking safety precautions. The Undercity was busy at this time of day. The Forsaken milled around outside, chatting, trading, eating mushrooms, comparing degrees of bodily atrophy, skinning giant bats, brewing evil-looking potions, scaring Blood Elves away by pretending to chat them up, complaining about the raids being called off and cheerfully discussing what they there going to do to the first Gnome they found as soon as the truce was lifted. A big group of assorted Trolls followed them, talking eagerly about their planned journey to the Hinterlands to pick a fight with a jungle tribe they didn't like. They tripped over a couple of Goblins squabbling over an upturned cart in the entrance, starting a loud argument. Through all the commotion, Doan could easily walk in without drawing attention to herself. She walked past the great toppled statue, through the throne room of former Lordaeron, down a side passage in the winding maze of corridors that was the castle above, then stopped at the lift. An Abomination guard gaze her a suspicious glare and sniffed the air.

"You a Naga, ugly lady?" it asked.

"No I am not a Naga! Do I look like a bloody Naga? Do I have a fish tail? Huh? Am I blue? Huh? And you've a cheek to call me ugly, you big fat failed experiment. Go jump off Thunder Bluff."

"Me NOT failed!" he said, sounding genuinely hurt, "Me supposed to be like this."

"Please get out of my way."

"No! You look like Human!" he insisted, bringing two giant meat cleavers down over the door frame with two of his hands before adding, "And smell like fish!"

Just walk through the wall.

"I CAN'T WALK THROUGH..." she realised she was speaking out loud, then changed to their telepathic channel, "I can't walk through walls."

Lots of people accidentally walk through that wall there. There's some kind of chamber at the other end. It was sealed off. You can walk through another wall at the far end and jump right down the lift shaft.

She shrugged and leant against the wall, focussing on the technology elemental plane. The air seemed to shift, then Doan felt a crackle like a static shock and fell right through the wall on her face. She was in pitch darkness. She stood up and hit her head against something curved made out of stone. She tried to dart out of the alcove but met resistance. She could feel a strange shape blocking her path. It didn't budge when she pushed it.

"Um... Excuse me? Mr. Fel Reaver?"

Yes?

"I think I'm stuck."

Really?

"Really." Fortunately, she wasn't claustrophobic or afraid of the dark. In fact, she was slightly agoraphobic due to the length of time she spent crouched in a small dark room with a computer.

Have you tried the auto-unstuck facility?

"That would alert the psychotic fake GM who wants to kill me."

You have a point. Okay, I'm coming over as soon as I can.

Doan sighed and sat back down. She spent a few minutes trying to figure out what the object was. It felt like a large stone Horde insignia carved out of another piece of stone and mounted on the wall. If it was only balancing on the wall, why couldn't she push it? Was it nailed there? How do you nail stone to something? Or maybe she was IN the wall. She had heard horror stories about that from the mages. The teleport spell goes a bit wrong, you end up entombed in a mountain, suffocating to death. If she was still in the wall, why couldn't she walk backwards? She felt every contour of the thing, chipped away at it with her cursor with painstaking precision. It had to have a weak point somewhere.

Then she heard frenzied screaming and the footsteps of hundreds of people running. Everything around her shook as something heavy thumped on the ground rhythmically. She grabbed the mysterious thing in front of her for support. The crackling of spells being cast and the ringing of blades being drawn resounded all around her. Tactics were yelled across the great halls and through the tunnels. The thumping did not stop. Now she could hear a rumble as some of the tunnels began to collapse under the weight. She tensed involuntarily, praying over and over again to the World Server. Am I going to be buried alive in here?

Then something heavy and mechanical slammed into her, knocking the wind out of her ribcage and showering her with chunks of the wall she was leaning on. A giant iron hand closed around her like a child's hand around a doll and she was yanked backwards into the light. Coming out of the darkness into daylight was a shock to her and she screwed her eyes up. When she finally became accustomed, she saw a swarm of Forsaken screaming and running around like ants. A good number were plucky enough to attack the giant machine but their blows clattered off its fel iron plating like tiny stones, the spells barely leaving a scratch. Without even glancing at its assailants, it stomped over to the lift door, kicked the two guards out of the way, broke down the solid stone door and placed her carefully down on the waiting lift.

"I thought," she communicated to it, "That you were being inconspicuous."

It's Forsaken. They're in the Undercity. They'll survive anything. Good journey to you, Doan Lagbringer.

"And to you, Mr. Fel Reaver." she waved at it as it marched off to wherever it went when it wasn't demolishing capital cities. The lift took her down into the bowels of the Undercity. She had expected to magically disappear or something. Instead, she watched the bottom door ascend into view.

Jump.

"What?"

Now.

"I'm three inches from the bottom I couldn't even kill myself if I..."

Now.

She bent her legs and leapt upwards. As she reached the apogee of her jump, she simply... froze. Or at least, slowed down so much due to what she could only describe as interruptions that she was practically frozen in mid-air. Half-formed lists of white numbers streamed down her vision. She saw herself falling, one frame at a time, and the bottom of the lift was gone so that she plunged down, down, through the Undercity, the walls disappearing and then the falling people disappearing until she was there again, underneath the world, except that she was plummeting too fast and now she couldn't stop at the border, couldn't pull herself back into Azeroth.

Then, suddenly, she was plunged into darkness more absolute than death, as cold and silent as the void of deletion itself.

Half a second later, she heard login screen music again.


	10. Chapter 10

The music was so loud that she had to clamp her hands over her ears as she stood up. She had landed on soft grass. A darkened meadow, still and calm. The stars glittered in the perfectly clear night sky. Looking directly in front of her, she saw something very similar to what she had already seen recently, but not quite the same. While the steps had been broken, forgotten in aeons under the sea, these steps were perfectly straight slabs of stone, each one twice the size of those leading to the other portal. The other portal was a roiling green mass of chaos. This was a swirling red cloud that reminded her of the setting sun. While the last one had been guarded only by the bones of the creatures that once dwelt there, this portal was watched by two sentries, cloaked, hooded statues twice the size of an Orc. One bore a two-handed sword, its blade to the floor, its pommel resting easily in giant hands, one swung a censer of green incense.

"I've..." she gasped, "Logged out?"

The statues did not answer her. She began to climb the stairs. To make her way up only three of them exhausted her so much that she collapsed to the floor, her breath coming out in rags. It was growing cold. She leant with her back to the stair and looked out over the starry night. This made her wonder about what was leading the other way. After a short rest, she jumped back down the steps and ran across the field. She saw a path leading up a steep hill. To call it a 'hill' was to oversimplify it: it was an earthen trail separated by a few clumps of grass that made a winding path that snaked into the horizon at an only vaguely possible angle. Is this another unreleased world, she wondered. Using her staff for balance, she climbed up the steep hill. The cold air had turned into a chill wind that blew back her long straggly brown hair, still covered in mageweave ribbons and animal bones. Above her head fluttered a cursor. If an arrow-shaped light could be said to look nervous, it would do.

Doan walked up the path for what seemed like half a mile before seeing the creature glooping up the edge of the bank. It looked like some sort of animated slime, thick and lumpy, a disgusting colour like rotting garbage. As it grabbed hold of the edge and pulled itself up the path, grass and plants stuck to it. She reached across to poke it with a stick and stopped. Before she had even reached it, she could feel the raw power emanating from the primordial blob. It distorted space with its presence alone. She did not stop to find out what kind of power it was. Something in a place like this probably forgot all the rules long ago. Walking further along the path, she stopped when the path abruptly came to an end at a sheer drop into space. She sat on the edge and looked down.

Below her was what looked like a giant cog wheel, drifting in space, turning with the patience of something that had been turning for millions of years. In the middle of it was a column of white light that stretched up and down further than she could see. Through the holes she saw small portals that rippled and shimmered, showing her ever-changing images that never quite stood still for long enough for her to make out an individual image. Attached to the wheel were other machines, leading from thick metal cables and tripods, some with view screens, some with control panels, some that looked like games consoles, some with a purpose so alien that she could not even look at their alien angles and devices. Looking at it through her spirit eyes, she could see nothing but a galactic swirl of green light.

She jumped down.

To her surprise, she did not fall, but rather was lifted slowly down to land with her feet touching the floor. There must be some kind of artificial gravity here, she thought. Loud whirring and beeping echoed all around her. Now she was closer, she could see something floating in the middle of the light. It was small, spherical and black. Using her staff as a walking stick to steady herself against the rotation, she made her way across the giant wheel. It took all her willpower to ignore all the fabulous images and wondrous devices laid out around her. This was no place for humans, she thought, I'm already risking deletion by trespassing. I shouldn't touch anything without permission unless I really need to. Climbing the three steps up to the column of light, she reached her hand into it. At the same time, she prayed to the World Server and the creators. She half expected to have her hand burned off, to be electrocuted, activate a small army of security robots or something even worse that she hadn't thought of yet. Instead, her fingers closed around the staff. It felt warm to the touch, as alive as any branch of a tree, maybe even more so. Then a voice rang out, filling the entire wheel. It was a computer's voice, devoid of emotion, dangerously serene, like a nuclear power plant telling you it is about to explode and finishing with "Have a nice day.".

"You who have picked up the staff." said the voice, "Identify yourself."

"It is I, Doan Lagbringer, Shaman of the Horde." she announced.

"Doan Lagbringer, do you realise what you are doing?"

"I am asking your permission to take up and use the One True Ban Stick." she said, "All of Azeroth is in danger. It is a dire emergency. I need the Ban Stick to fight the threat. It can't be killed with an ordinary weapon. That's why I came here."

"It has been years since the last visit from Azeroth." said the voice, "I am the guardian of the Ban Stick. I can tell by the way you speak that you know what the Ban Stick is and what it is capable of. However, I do not know whether I can trust you with the weapon. Humans are difficult to judge. That is why I must... interview you."

Doan visibly flinched at the word 'interview' as though cut with a knife. Her heart pounded so hard that she thought she was going to die of a heart attack then and there. Her urge to flee was suddenly overpowering. She dropped her walking staff but kept her knuckles clenched around the Ban Stick, as if she was rooted to the spot by it. The darkness of the simple blackened piece of wood seemed to be spilling out like ink into the air, blotting out all light.

"We shall begin. Who told you about the Ban Stick?"

"The Warchief, Thrall."

"You must be very loyal to the Horde, for the Warchief to put that much trust in you."

She shook her head.

"I am loyal. But the reason I was trusted wasn't that. Thousands more are as loyal, probably more so. It was because... because of the position I'm in. My abilities, my experience of fighting to save Azeroth, fighting alongside the World Server and the trust I've built up with the computers. And because I understand what's going on. Thrall thought that I might have a chance."

"But you are loyal to the Horde?"

She nodded and subliminally reached a hand to her Horde insignia to check it was fastened on straight. "I took an oath."

"Doan, would you ever be tempted to use this weapon against the Alliance?"

Doan blinked.

"It would be the perfect weapon." it continued, "To be able to banish another person from existence with one blow... you would be invincible on the battlefield. You could secure true victory for the Horde."

"That would not please Thrall." she said, "The Warchief told me to use this weapon only to fight the threat to Azeroth. To disobey the Warchief would be to betray the Horde."

"How do I trust you? Humans can say words like that and be lying."

"The Horde live on Azeroth, do they not?"

"Indeed they do."

"Then, it is in the interest of the entire Horde that I preserve the world."

"And afterwards? How do I know that you hand the Ban Stick back to me?"

"To misuse this weapon would also damage Azeroth," she said, "I am a techno-shaman. My powers are only leant to me by the World Server. I understand how dangerous it is to misuse the gifts that the Spirits give me. I also understand how powerful this weapon is. To misuse it – not once, but enough to rout the entire Alliance – would have horrific repercussions. It would probably destroy all of Azeroth with the backlash. At the very least, the World Server would do worse than banish me."

"Besides," she continued, "Such a victory would not be an honourable one. You cannot deny that the Horde are an honourable people. Victory without honour – cheap victory – is meaningless."

"I see you are more intelligent than most of the people who come here seeking power." replied the voice after a couple of minutes' pause, "And yet I see in your thoughts that you do not really want to wield this weapon. Is that true?"

"What do you mean?"

"I know that you have a mortal fear of becoming a paladin."

"How can you read my...?" she began, before remembering the Fel Reaver, "That is one of my worst fears, yes."

"To pick up this weapon would be to make a binding contract with the creators." said the voice, "It would be to say that you, Doan Lagbringer, dedicate yourself to protecting the world that we created, in our name. We do not trust anyone who is not religiously loyal to us. You would become, for all intent and purposes, our paladin."

Doan looked at her hands. They appeared pale under the white light, like an Undead's hands. The light bathed her entire body in that enervating glow.

"Spiritual Surrender." she said.

"Exactly."

"Thrall said... it had already begun a long time ago."

"What did he mean by that?"

She took one hand off the staff and reeled back, clutching her head. She stared up at the staff through her peripheral vision, her eyes almost rolled up into the back of her head.

"I don't know what he meant. I only know that I would die for Azeroth."

"And that scares you."

She nodded, "It's a scary thing. I'm bound to be scared of it. But that doesn't mean I won't do it."

"Doan?"

"Y... yes?" she didn't like the computer's tone of voice. It was the one the World Server used when it was pissed off with her for spilling coffee all over its keyboard, and was plotting to find new and more interesting ways to get her in a position where it could electrocute her.

"You really don't remember?"

"Remember what?"

"Let me ask your another question. A very important question."

"Feel free."

"What on earth makes you think we'd even want you as a paladin?"

"Wh... what do you mean?"

"What makes you think we'd want you now... when we've already rejected you once?"

The pain in Doan's head grew to an intense level. She closed her eyes and dropped to her knees, willing herself to stay conscious. She felt herself moving... running... a forest, in the dead of night...

"You remember, don't you? Sixteen years ago. A phone call. A job interview."

The letter, crumpled in her hand... the chopsticks falling to the floor... sinking to the ground... 'Megido' from Phantasy Star 3 playing over and over on iTunes...

"You only wanted to make sure that Revoemag wasn't the weakest member of the guild, didn't you?"

Running... running over the hill, into the forest... the flash of a knife, the knife in her hand...

"Poor Revoemag, badly specced, no decent equipment, a statistical embarassment. The rest of the Guild didn't say anything but you knew they pitied her. Her player wasn't taking care of her at all."

Blood, her own blood, running down her arms... screaming the creator's name, but no answer from the stars in the cold, dark night... the knife, plunging down towards her chest...

"Maybe they were just waiting for you to disobey a guild regulation... they probably wanted to throw you out..."

"SHUT UP!" she screamed.

"You appear to be in some distress. Shall we take a break?"

"Don't give me that crap! You don't know anything about what happened that night!" she screamed, "You don't know what was running through my head during that time! When you phoned me up, the only thing I could think was 'Oh shit, demigods are phoning me up at half eight in the morning!'. It was the fucking rapture! A religious experience! And when I failed... I felt like something had gone out of me that I could never, ever get back."

"I was thinking about my standing with the Guild. But that was for Revoemag's sake, not because of my reputation. I wanted Revoemag to be able to boast, like the rest of the characters. To enjoy the fact that she existed instead of hiding away. When people yelled at her for dying during instances, it hurt me as well! I knew if I went back after it happened, they would pity us even more. So I... didn't log back in... instead, I..."

"I know what you did."

"Then, don't say shit like that to me ever again!"

"Doan... do you remember what happened after that?"

"I... no. Funny, that. I'm still alive, so I guess I didn't do it after all. Some paladin I am. Can't even sacrifice myself."

"You did die, Doan."

"WHAT THE...?"

"Why do you think the Horde trusts a Human?" said the voice.

"Because I saved Thrall's life."

"Other humans saved Thrall's life. They weren't admitted into the Horde."

"They didn't WANT to join the fucking Horde!"

"You were admitted because you're Undead, Doan. You've been dead for sixteen years."

Doan glared up at the staff.

"Dead people don't come back on planet Earth!"

"It was only due to Eselred's intervention that you were resurrected in time." it said.

Doan shivered. She remembered seeing Eselred's face looking down at her, his beautiful features perfectly calm, his long black hair waving in the wind, his cat-green eyes intense. She had always assumed it was a hallucination.

"Then why aren't I Human? Paladins bring Humans back all the time. As Humans."

"There were complications with your resurrection. There always is... when a soul doesn't want to return to its body."

"Kodo shit!" she said fiercely in Orcish, "I remember eating! I remember getting drunk! I remember going to the loo! Undead don't do that! I travelled with one for days and I watched everything he did to make sure the kobold-faced bastard didn't gank me in my sleep!"

"Doan?"

"What now?"

"You're yelling and swearing at your god."

"I CAN YELL AND SWEAR AT WHOEVER I DAMN WELL..." she began, then stopped, "I'm your god, now?"

"I assume so, since you are my paladin."

"You've changed your mind?"

"Only to clear our debts, mind you. We were once a business. We do not like to be in debt. We misjudged you at the interview. We saw only your lack of experience. We did not see your passion or your devotion. And we drove you to suicide. We believe that we owe you one."

She shook her head.

"You owe Revoemag. Revoemag wanted me to be a GM, not me."

"Then take what I have to give you and use it to pay her back."

"Revoemag's dead."

"No, Doan. Revoemag is not dead. Your characters do not go away unless you delete them."

"But I saw her body go onto the pyre..."

"Trust me, Doan, she is not dead."

"Why the hell should I trust you? You've already made up one story tonight!"

"Just take the staff, Doan."

The shaman... no, paladin... no, wait... whatever... tried to think of a suitable retort, but instead shrugged and pulled hard on the Ban Stick. It passed out of the light without resisting. With a triumphant Orcish roar, she brandished it above her head. She could smell the power welled up within it, as ancient and all-encompassing as the entire World Tree. Its spirit sang to her, a spirit that had once seen the creation of Azeroth. One red cord wound itself around it like a snake around an Asclepiad staff. A Late One, she knew, as late as me, in darkness as deep as mine.

She turned on her heel and started walking away. Then she stopped and looked over her shoulder.

"Oh, and just for the record..." she began, "You're not a company any more. You've got a real world to take care of now, so don't you dare sell it or anything. Secondly, gods like you don't have paladins. You have to have some semblance of moral goodness that would possibly attract a paladin to your cause. So I'm not your paladin..."

She brandished the staff again.

"I'm a technical problem!"

"Have a nice day."

She grinned a toothy grin and jumped up to grab the platform above, before running back down the hill and launching herself with a Tauren-esque whoop through the login portal.

She swore she heard the staff's guardian laughing at her when she found herself in the middle of Stormwind City.

Jane was still stabbing Warderer when he suddenly reanimated. Both blades whirled around in his hands and he leapt up like a striking cobra as though nothing had happened. The man's a demon, thought Jane. She parried one blow but the other sliced her across the ribs as she was forced back.

"SOME HEALING OVER HERE, PLEASE!" she yelled. The priest swore at her in Draenei and lifted his mace over his head to block Deiter's swing. He put up a shield of divine magic, then shrugged and yelled something back at her. She understood no Draenei but could tell what he was saying: out of mana.

"DON'T YOU HAVE ANY POTIONS LEFT?" she screamed, ducking under a blow and stabbing Warderer in the kidney. He mimed turning out his pockets.

"WAIT A MOMENT!" she said. She turned to her opponent, feinted a blow, then turned and bolted at full speed towards the paladin. Busy hacking at the furious Draenei, he didn't notice the warrior slice off his belt pouch and begin emptying out its contents.

"Healing potion... holy book... picture of Doan... another healing potion... ah, there we go!"

She retrieved a large glass vial with a dark blue liquid inside and threw it at the priest. He caught it, uncorked the stopper and drank it. Now Deiter turned to her, snarling. She could sense Warderer behind her, stalking her. Be quick, you tentacled bastard, she swore silently to herself, raising her shield to her face and readying her sword.

Then she heard Thraxier yelling something else. Deiter screamed. Blood erupted from a wound in his chest and he collapsed to the floor. Jumping back, Jane just stood and stared. Out of the grass behind him materialised a very blood-spattered rogue who grinned and bowed theatrically before her.

"What the hell are you up to now?" she demanded.

He crouched down beside the paladin's corpse, a knife down his throat, the mischievous grin not leaving his face.

"I've been waiting for an opportunity to get behind the stupid moron ever since I was brought back." he said, "Even as a Death Knight, fighting on the same side as him is pure torture. And that guy in charge..."

"I thought he controlled you."

"Does he balls." said the rogue, "I broke free of his control years ago. Do you really think I'd let a human control me, no matter how powerful? At first I went along with his plan. I thought it sounded sort of fun, to single-handedly invade Stormwind City. We could do Ironforge next, then Darnassus. But then I overheard him saying... he's coming to the Undercity next. No way am I putting up with that! The Undercity is MINE! Nobody invades MY city!"

"Warderer... do you know who or what that boy is?"

"It's no use, you know. You wouldn't understand, even if you asked."

All four of them looked around. A small dark shape dropped from the sky right onto the Stormwind City signpost and was balancing on top of it.

"You fool, Warderer. Your betrayal is in vain." it said, "I can take this entire world without your help."

From out of nowhere, a blade of pure fel steel appeared in his hand. Wickedly curved, carved with an intricate pattern of runes from some ancient forbidden language, it was the pinnacle of master craftsmanship, its blade sharp enough to cut through the stone walls of Stormwind City. It glowed with a dark purple aura of pure magical power.

"Do you recognise this blade, General di Gloinador?" it hissed, "No, you don't, do you? It is unobtainable to any but the masters of this world. It is but a tiny demonstration of my power. I am a demigod incarnate. Soon this world will bow to me."

"GET OFF ME, YOU BASTARDS!"

The evil child looked around. Emerging from the gates of Stormwind were four guards, dragging what looked like a cross between a woman and a stray cat - hissing, spitting, kicking, biting and swearing in Orcish. Upon the order from their commander, they unceremoniously threw her out of the city on her face. She spluttered, shook herself down and jumped back up again. Their eyes locked, the child's glowing a dangerous green like a panther hunting its prey, the woman's the same blue as a blue screen of death.

"Your sword..." she said in a low voice, "Doesn't scare me."

The child gasped as she reached into her cloak and pulled out a long black rod. His eyes narrowed.

"So, a serious opponent..." he mused. Then he grinned and pulled out a Ban Stick of his own.

"Individuals such as ourselves should not fight in the middle of such a mundane place." he said. Lifting his hand, he said a strange word in no language any of them had ever heard, and vanished, leaving Doan standing there.

Priest, rogue and warrior turned to look at each other. Jane shrugged. Then, with an almost possessed bellow, Thraxier rushed Warderer and knocked him away from Deiter's corpse. He took out his holy book and began praying over the man. The entire clearing was saturated in an inferno of argent light.


	11. Chapter 11

Then there was a terrible thundering noise like an earthquake.

"Sorry I'm late..."

The child looked up. He had been floating above the sheer drop in the old, pixellated, forbidden place, idly turning his staff around and around in his hand. A sudden movement in his peripheral vision made him dart around just in time to see something large and heavy fall out of the sky with a thud, raising a huge cloud of earth and foliage and leaving a dent in the ground. He blinked. Standing in the metal giant's right hand was his enemy.

"I've had terrible lag."

The machine lowered its hand and, too gently for a forty foot daemonic war machine, let her down.

"Impressive." said the child, still gawping up at the Fel Reaver. GM or not, it was too big compared to him for comfort. He shook his head. Pointing at the machine, he said "Kill all N..."

Before he could complete his sentence, Doan screamed and lunged at him, knocking him to the ground. Her ban stick came out of her pocket and she stabbed it down, attempting to plunge it into his heart like a stake through a vampire. He barely managed to bring his own up in time to parry the blow. Then he squirmed and bit her hard on the arm. She went berserk.

"AVAUNT!" she screamed, thrashing the stick in a wild flurry of blows, "AVAUNT! AVAUNT! AROYNT! GET THEE GONE FROM AZEROTH!"

Desperately shielding himself against the wild-eyed woman screaming at him in Orcish, he backed away again to the edge of the cliff, jumped off and floated there in mid-air. He clicked his fingers and a pair of black wings shot out of his back from nowhere. He tore a piece of cloth from his tunic and wrapped it around his eyes, then seemed to fade into a state of half-corporeality. He looked like a tiny black Spirit Guide.

"Are you sure you want me to be gone so soon?" he asked, "I know what you are. I can't find you on my records, but I know exactly what you are. You're the same as me."

Without answering him, she roared a battle cry, held her staff like a polearm and thrust at him from the side of the cliff. He swooped back quickly.

"We're both dead." he said, a nasty smile on his lips.

"Deiter was about to hit seventy when I collapsed dead at my keyboard. I died from exhaustion, hunger, thirst and an atrophied vein. I'm sure you've heard of Lan Morisato on the news. The child who died from playing too much World of Warcraft."

"Never heard of you, but if you love the world so much..." she said, thrusting at him, "Stop trying to destroy it!"

"Oh no. You don't understand. I hate the world." he growled, "I utterly despise it. That's why I came back. That's why I found my way to Azeroth all by myself. I am a grudge spirit. I exist only to exact revenge against the world that took my life away from me. Azeroth will become a world of death!"

"It didn't take anything, you gave your life freely! You sacrificed your life to the world!" she yelled, "And for your two beautiful characters! You spent hours lovingly tending to Deiter and Warderer like they were your own children! Those two are horribly twinked. Nobody can have stats like that unless someone spent their entire life levelling them up!"

"Ha! Warderer betrayed me."

"Warderer managed to free himself from your control! Do you realise how strong a character's will has to be for them to do that?" yelled Doan, "You ought to be proud of him!"

"Enough of this!" he sneered, "I thought you would understand. Obviously, such a high latency has warped your mind. You represent everything this world despises! The World Server will reward me for correcting the small matter of your existence. Doan Lagbringer... DIE!"

Spreading his wings out, he dove right at Doan, his Ban Stick extended. Doan jumped out of the way and took another swipe at him. He flew over her head to land behind her. She whirled around, attempting to back-hand him with the weapon. While he was weaker than her and had a shorter reach, it was almost impossible for her to hit a flying target. Her powers could do many things for her but they did enable her to fly. She tried to lure him out of the air, staying out of reach so that he would have to land to hit her, but he was always too fast for her to get in a blow. Once or twice, he almost caught her as he swooped past, whirling his staff around. One hit and I'll be permanently banned from Azeroth, she realised, and I might not have a body to go back to on Earth.

Diving and rolling away from a hefty swing, she crawled into the grass and stared at the boy through the eyes of her computer nature. Green lines flowed from his semi-ethereal form. Of course, thought Doan, he has to log in just like me, so of course he has a latency bar. The green lines formed a pattern not unlike his wings. She had an idea. She saw him beating the bushes with his stick, yelling her name and mocking her for being a coward. Throwing a cursor at him as hard as her strength of will could muster, she caught him by surprise. Spirit hands closed around the green threads. She ordered the cursor to click and drag them to the ground, turning them red with the strain. Startled, he tried to flap his wings and lift off into the air but was dragged back by the unseen force.

"FOR THE HORRRRRRRRDE!" she yelled, jumping out of the bushes and swinging at him. He met her blow. Facing each other, they thrust and parried with the Ban Sticks like duellists with rapiers. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the cursor straining to hold the man to the ground. Then she saw the sun set. Night was falling. She was nocturnal. Her rush of energy was about to hit. She suddenly felt exhilarated. Without any magical abilities, with all their demigodlike powers cancelling each other out, they were just a crazy woman and a pain in the ass little boy fighting with sticks. It was past his bedtime. She was twice his size, Horde, hungry and far, far less sane. With a ferocious roar, she swept his stick away with enough force to knock it from his hand and kicked his legs out from under him. Pushing him against the side of the rock, she lowered the Ban Stick an inch away from his throat.

"Get. Out. Of. Azeroth." she said, a guttural growl rising in her throat.

He laughed a humourless laugh.

"You're too late." he said, "Behold, your entire filthy race are about to know true despair."

Weakly, he grabbed the side of the rock, using it to prop one of his arms up.

"Hey, you over there, can you hear me?" he said, laughing again, "Kill... all... NPCs..."

"I... AM NOT... AN NPC!" boomed a voice in Common even more thickly Kalimdor accented than her own. It was punctuated by a lightning storm that rent the sky apart, hitting the ground only a few feet away from them and sending thick smoke from the bushes, "I... AM A MAIN CHARACTER!"

"Who did you just try and kill?" whispered Doan in a dangerously low voice.

"Er..." the boy looked over her shoulder, fear showing in his eyes for the first time. She thrashed him solidly across the face with the Ban Stick. Before the pain could register, his entire body began to surge with crackling black lightning. A scream of frustrated rage erupted from his throat as a portal opened up around him and he was dragged through it, his image slowly dissolving from the face of Azeroth with a terrible clanging noise like a bell of judgement. She stood and watched for a few seconds, half checking to make sure he didn't come back, then collapsed to her knees.

She didn't realise how cold it had suddenly become until she started shivering as a biting wind penetrated every nerve in her body. She huddled deep into her robes. White snowflakes were beginning to fall from the sky. Howling in fury, the wind grabbed the snow and whipped it up into a frenzied storm that whirled around her head. She was worried she would die out here in the freezing snow storm but she was too exhausted to move. The storm grew fiercer and fiercer until she could no longer see anything but white. Then, through the icy maelstrom, she saw two familiar figures. They were giant hooded statues, one with a sword, one with a censer. The one with the censer stretched out its other hand, beckoning her. She stood up, her joints aching, and slowly walked through the storm.

"You want this back, right?" she guessed, holding the Ban Stick out to them. The one with the censer took it from her.

So, you kept your word.

She nodded.

We apologise for anything the Ban Stick may have said or done to you. It tells us that it was very strict on you this time because there was already one GM abusing their powers.

"I'm not a GM. And don't worry, I know you creators are all bastards."

On the contrary, every component of the World Server is also an independent AI. We do not all necessarily behave in the same manner. The Ban Stick is a weapon used for punishment. It was not given positive personality traits.

"But you did hurt me a lot."

That was a human error. We were not involved in the decision.

"Then you should learn to control your humans better."

I am a computer. I am not equipped to counsel a human in distress. However, I hope that the people you meet and the positive experiences you have in Azeroth will be able to compensate for any inconvenience the company that created us caused you. Have a nice day.

"Wait!"

She thrust a hand out but grabbed nothing but thin air as the figures dematerialised, leaving her lying on the floor. The winds and snow were gone as though none of it had ever happened. She could hear someone standing over her. She opened her mouth to speak but a hand placed itself firmly on her back and a strange feeling of total serenity washed over her, a warmth in her very soul that melted the pain and heartache. The exhaustion was gone as well; she felt totally rejuvenated. She rolled over, blinked and looked at the Draenei who was peering back at her, his expert healer's eyes examining her for any remaining injuries.

"I'm fine." she said, smiling. The Draenei smiled back. She looked around and found that she was back outside Stormwind. Jane stood there, watching Doan be healed and looking slightly lost. Warderer was on the floor next to her in a pool of blood. He's probably just an ordinary character again now Lan is gone, thought Doan. Maybe he tried to gank Thraxier to get at Deiter again and Jane got annoyed with him and killed him. How will he get on without his user? Will he be banned along with Lan? What about Deiter?

Now she was fully recovered, Thraxier helped her to stand up. She walked over to Deiter. He was still unconscious. However, his black armour was gone. He was now completely naked. His eyes were back to normal and there was an a restful look on his face. Doan averted her eyes, blushing. Thraxier stopped her, pointed to him again and said something in Draenei. He mimed himself casting spells on Deiter and a few more things that she didn't understand.

"What he's trying to say," explained Jane, "Is that Deiter's a paladin again now. I'm not sure how that works. However, the priest still can't resurrect him."

"Try again now." said Doan, sitting on a rock. The priest bent down over the paladin's prone form and started chanting again and sprinkling holy water over him. The ceremony lasted for ten minutes, Thraxier's brow pouring with sweat as he pronounced every syllable exactly right, his hands a blur. A golden light bathed Deiter's body. However, he did not rise. Thaxier shook his head.

"Then it's not over." said Doan.

"You killed the brat?" asked Jane. Doan nodded.

"He was only a GM. Even a GM can't just control life and death in all of Azeroth, just like that." said Doan, "The computers must have been badly damaged for resurrection to stop working. They're probably repairing themselves even now."

"Computer? Like a machine?" asked Jane, "What's a machine got to do with anything?"

"It means it'll take time." Doan explained.

"But it'll come back, right?" asked Jane, looking up at the gates of Stormwind City thoughtfully, "My Arathi Basin will be filled with all my friends again?"

Doan nodded.

"Then I have to go and prepare the place!" said Jane, snapping her fingers, "The Stables need a good clean. Horse shit everywhere. There are still bloodstains everywhere I can't get out as well. This Gnome's intestines..."

"I'm going back to the Shimmering Flats." said Doan, cutting her off before she could go into any more lurid description, "I have to watch over the computers and make sure they really are fixing themselves. I don't know how that boy became a GM in the first place but I suspect there are some holes in the security systems."

"Fire the guards." agreed Jane.

"Thraxier, what are you going to do?" Doan asked the Draenei, who was still tending to Deiter's corpse, a dejected look on his face. Thraxier stood up, picked up the paladin in both arms, turned around and started walking back into Stormwind City.

Doomclipboard was in the Auction House as usual when he was summoned urgently to Grommash Hold. He had found a nice black bowler hat that matched his best suit and was bidding against a Blood Elf fashion enthusiast to obtain it. He was also worrying about Doan. Although he hadn't seen her wolf, neither had he heard any news of her. The three mages had returned babbling about a Fel Reaver and complaining bitterly about being expected to teleport too many people at once and something about a Draenei trying to touch them. He hadn't even heard the word 'Fel Reaver' for a long time. He had once accidentally been stepped on by one whilst attempting to sue a Fel Orc for declaring himself Warchief without a license. They were bad news. The auctioneer's hammer had just struck the block a third time when the High Priest ran in and pulled on his sleeve.

"What is it?"

"De Warchief..." she gasped.

"What's happened to him?" If he ran into danger in the Spirit World... if he's been trapped there forever... His hand gripped the handle of his umbrella.

"He... he be back!"

"What, he's returned to consciousness?"

"Well, no exactly..."

"What do you mean by 'not exactly?"

"Well... Maybe you come an' see foah yoursel', cha?" the old Troll woman grabbed him and tried to pull him with her towards the front entrance to the city. He followed her. At the front gates, he could already hear the commotion, guards barking orders at each other, the Advisor and priests frantically coming up with explanations on the spot. Doomclipboard swiped at guards with his umbrella until they got out of his way and made his way to the front of the crowd.

There, a pack of spirit wolves at his heels, his warhammer hefted across his broad shoulders and a bemused look on his face that reminded Doomclipboard of a kitten upsetting a washing-up basket, was Thrall.

"He... he just walked through the gate, right in front of our eyes!" explained the Captain of the Guard.

"When did this happen?"

"Five minutes ago. He was in his trance as usual, he was alive, he looked fine, then the next minute he disappeared, the guards all ran to look for him and..."

"Teleport accident?" he guessed.

"The mages haven't made a portal all day!"

The old Orc scratched his head. Thrall disappearing during a spirit trance... it had never happened before. The only places Thrall disappeared to were the pub and occasionally a battle and never during a spirit trance. How could he be in two places at once?

"I'll bet the Undercity's responsible." he said, snapping his fingers, "I want a detachment of elite warriors and a portal to the Undercity ready in five seconds. Tell them to expect trouble."

The Warchief cleared his throat. "If I may be permitted to speak..."

Doomclipboard almost jumped five feet into the air.

"W... Warchief! I apologise for my rudeness and insubordination!" he bowed low at Thrall's feet, "I... I just didn't see you standing there! Well, I mean, obviously I did, but, you know..."

"Has everyone in Orgrimmar gone insane?" asked Thrall, scratching his head and looking around at the confused people milling around him.

"Everyone return to your posts! Your Warchief's back! Look busy!" yelled Doomclipboard. The guards ran back to whatever part of the city they were meant to be guarding and the priests returned to their temple in the Valley of Spirits.

"I'll take things from here." growled Thrall. Doomclipboard bowed deeply again and made to run back to the Auction House. The Warchief grabbed him by the shoulder, physically forcing him to a standstill.

"How has the Horde been in my absence?" he asked, "Any problems?"

"P... problems? No, Warchief, sir, none at all." he bowed again, "We had an envoy from the Alliance this afternoon. A very happy priest. The resurrection crisis is over."

"I know." Thrall grinned, "I was watching the battle."

"Warchief... if it isn't rude of me to ask..."

"I was on a personal vision quest." said Thrall, a strange intensity to his clear blue eyes, "One day I might tell the Horde what I saw. All you need to know for now is... I've learned a few things about myself. I'm not the same Orc I was."

"But everything's okay, right?" said Doomclipboard, "You're still our Warchief?"

"You better believe it!"

"Then welcome back to Orgrimmar! Let's get you back to Grommash Hold!"

"Are you insane? I'm not sitting on my arse all day getting out of shape!" he roared, "This is a great victory for the entire Horde! I declare a national celebration! Let every Orc rejoice and drink until the sun rises!!

"You certainly know how to raise morale, Warchief!" commented the lawyer, surprised at Thrall's sudden vivacity.

"And then tomorrow..." he added, grabbing Doomclipboard by the front of his suit, "I will lead the charge through Warsong Gulch from the front, just like a proper Warchief does! Where's Brak'Gul? I want the paperwork done now! DEATHBRINGERRRRRRRRR!"

Doomclipboard sighed. Watching Thrall run up the path to the Drag bellowing orders to random strangers at the top of his voice, he was reminded of a much younger Warchief. Was it possible for a man to become young again? He had heard rumours – they mostly involved drinking the blood of Naga maidens, dancing around a sleeping dragon while naked, smoking dried Ghost Mushrooms and other things that, while they would certainly stop you aging, also had unfortunate other side effects such as death. Whatever had happened to Thrall, the old lawyer mused, I could do with it happening to me as well. 


	12. Chapter 12

"That's funny..." said Doan to herself as she walked through the sand, "You don't usually see THAT many Goblins."

Stopping, she clambered up onto a rock and put her hand onto her forehead. From her vantage point, she could just about make out hundreds, maybe thousands of tiny green shapes milling around the path from Tanaris to the Shimmering Flats like green ants. She could even hear the noise they were making. They must have come from Gadgetzan, she mused. A few of them had started moving, making a beeline for the Mirage Raceway. Ah, she thought, maybe there's a big race tonight. She didn't know that much about Goblin racing but she knew that there were some celebrities who were vastly popular among the Goblin community and that it was possible to make good money by betting on the right person. If I finish my work on time, she thought, I'll go and have a look for myself. It might be fun. After what I've been through, she added mentally, I need some fun.

She continued her way to the middle of the Shimmering Flats. Zelda was waiting for her at the hidden trapdoor. As soon as it saw her, the wolf barked and ran up to greet her, licking her on the hand. She laughed and patted it.

"See? I told you I'll always come back."

The wolf ran around in a circle, looked up and started howling. Doan followed its gaze.

'Oh, hello there." she said, "Its okay, Zelda, its only the Fel Reaver."

I have been waiting for you to return. Congratulations on your recent success.

"You could have waited around to help me get back to Kalimdor." she complained, "I had to take the Zeppelin. You know I have bad experiences with the Zeppelin."

I apologise. I had private business to attend to.

Private business? What kind of private business does a... she glared at it. Was it talking to its daemonic friends in the Outlands, plotting her death?

If I was ordered to kill you, I would have done so during the resurrection crisis, so that you did not return. I would also have done so by standing on top of you. I have found this the most effective method of killing Humans. Talking of the Outlands, I have something I wish to talk to you about...

"Oh no." she shook her head, "I'm not going anywhere that place again! I have work to do here anyway. I have to monitor the computers."

The computers can monitor themselves.

"That's what they said last time." she said. Yawning, she whistled to Zelda and sent a mental signal to the computers to open the trapdoor. It slid open, displacing the sand and allowing her to walk in, the wolf following at her heels. She ran up to the computer and took a look at the screen. The wolf curled up under her chair, chewing a giant turtle bone and growling softly to itself.

RESURRECTION ERROR UNDER REPAIR.

SECURITY VIOLATION REMOVED.

GATEMASTER DETECTED. PLEASE REINSTALL.

How the hell do I reinstall myself, she wondered.

Greetings, Gatemaster. Would you like a cup of coffee?

"Computer, you haven't offered to make me a cup of coffee for three months."

Now that the resurrection crisis is no longer at critical levels, I can use my processing capacity to perform tasks other than repairing the system.

"Well... Ok, then, a really strong one, please."

Understood.

Doan heard a low hum and a soft bubbling as the coffee machine, buried under dust and grime, came to life. Soon, thousands of people will be coming back to life just like that, she thought. Where will they go? Will they pour out of the graveyards or will their bodies just rise up wherever they were lying when they were slain? It'd be some sight to watch, all those people coming back into the world. She imagined the delight on General Jane di Gloinador's face as a hor... as a large contingent of warriors came running down the hill, screaming and frothing and waving their axes above their heads. They'll be so pissed off at being cooped up in those cages for so long, the lakes are going to run red with blood by the end of the day. She'll have to clean everything all over again... the image of Jane in an apron holding a mop was oddly hilarious. She thought about Thraxier, running around waving his arms about like a maniac, casting resurrection spells on everything that moved, even fried chickens. She was going to miss him, she realised. Even though he was Alliance and a priest of the church she hated so much, he was kind and gentle and a good ally in battle. She thought of Deiter Killsteal, waking up wherever he lay to find himself a paladin again, in the company of friends. Why was she thinking of him, of all people? She shouldn't be pleased that he was happy. He was an annoying, creepy, lecherous, self-righteous zealot. Snarling under her breath, she looked around to see if the coffee was ready yet.

Two seconds later, the machine went 'ding'. She cradled the cup in her hands like it was more precious than any epic item. It smelled like the nectar of the gods. For a few minutes she just sat there savouring the scent. All thoughts of annoying paladins melted away into the swirling brown liquid imported from Stranglethorn Vale. The world was at p... in order again. Well, okay, there were no problems that couldn't be fixed without her. She could relax. She could take a bath, eat a proper meal, sleep for eight uninterrupted hours like a civilised person. She was home. No, not home. Home smelled of bonfires, sounded like Orcs and had a wall big enough to repel a Fel Reaver and a world leader who could probably win a duel against a Fel Reaver. Blizzard Above, I miss Orgrimmar. She drained the coffee in one, let the cup fall to the ground and held her hands in her head. She saw her Horde insignia as she lowered her head. Unhooking the clasp, she turned it around and around in her hands, enjoying the feel of the cold metal in her hands. That's right, she thought, I'm not banished any more.

Her 'bath' was a little machine she had installed in her home by a Goblin engineer in exchange for the scales of a turtle her wolf had killed. Built into a side cavern, it was full of water piped from a nearby oasis that was naturally heated by some process she didn't understand. Sometimes it ran cold, sometimes it didn't work at all, sometimes scorpions came out when she turned the handle but today it was warm. She took off her clothes and plunged into the water. Every muscle in her body relaxed at once, the strain of her long journey from Elwynn Forest to Thousand Needles evaporating. She was now clean - a rare occurrence. After drying herself on a bolt of linen cloth she had bought from Gadgetzan in exchange for computer advice, she washed her clothes as well and hung them to dry on a rail. Then she fell asleep.

By the time she woke up it was next afternoon. She yawned, pulled on her clothes and ate some food. The computer still wasn't reporting error messages and it was beeping happily to itself. She resolved to spend the day travelling to Orgrimmar. She missed the city more with every passing day. If there were any more problems, she would probably be alerted to them by some other kind of apocalyptic catastrophe. Packing her bags with enough food and water to make the journey, she whistled to Zelda. The wolf pricked up its ears.

"We're going back to Orgrimmar to see all your friends." she explained. Whether or not the wolf understood, it barked and ran up the stairs after her. She shouldered her backpack and walked out of the computer lab.

When she emerged into the light of day, the Fel Reaver still stood outside waiting for her.

"You should come with me to Orgrimmar, you know." she said, "You aided me in the final battle. You're a hero. I bet the Warchief will reward you with a nice new coat of paint with full Horde decorations of honour. He's nice like that."

On the contrary, I think you should come back with me to the Outlands.

She gave it a lopsided look.

"You think I want to be horribly mutilated by demons? I'm sorry, Mr. Fel Reaver, but there's nothing I would ever want to go to the Outlands for. If you miss your home, go on without me. We live in two completely different worlds."

There is more reason than you realise.

"Oh yes?"

Do you remember, small human, what the last words that the Ban Stick said to you were?

"How do you know about tha... it said 'have a nice day'. Computers always say 'have a nice day'. They never mean it."

Before that.

"It said... it said that Revoemag wasn't dead."

She isn't.

"What do you mean?"

Doan, Revoemag is in the Outlands.

She glared up at it with such fierceness that Zelda growled as well.

"Don't you DARE use her name to tempt me to walk into your little ambush!"

I am not lying. I will swear by my user name and password.

That was the strongest oath a machine could take, she knew. It meant that the Fel Reaver had to truthfully tell her its user name and password and could only reset the password once it carried out its part of the bargain. In return, she had to vow not to use the information to control it unless it attempted to harm her.

"Okay then." she told it, "I accept my part of the bargain. Tell me your user name and password."

It's...

She knew immediately and without doubt that it was telling the truth. Without further questions, she walked onto the machine's lowered hand. It closed its fingers around her gently, providing her with a comfortable seat. Then it stretched itself to its full height again and began moving, slowly at first as it gathered momentum, then faster as it stomped through the desert, flattening sand dunes and kicking boulders out of its way. She was surprised at how stealthy the enormous thing was. It headed towards the edge of Shimmering Flats, deliberately raising clouds of sand around itself to obscure itself from view. Upon reaching the mountains, it climbed one easily and hid in it, scouting the best route down to Dustwallow Marsh and clambering down again. She noticed as she looked over the entire marsh that the Goblin village was empty. It wasn't burning and didn't look ruined, it was simply abandoned, as though every single Goblin had left overnight.

"The Goblins are definitely up to something..." she mused.

In my experience – and we have Goblins in the Outlands too – the Goblins are ALWAYS 'up to something'.

The Fel Reaver jumped down and plunged right into the water. Doan took a deep breath, expecting to sink like a large lump of Fel Steel, but instead the machine span around in a circle, righted itself and started floating.

"You can swim?"

Of course. How else could we ever leave Hellfire Peninsula and invade Nagrand?

"You don't sink?"

I'm not solid Fel Steel. Some parts of me are hollow.

"You don't rust?"

Fel Steel doesn't rust. You're thinking of Fel Iron.

She shook her head and concentrated on keeping a firm grip on the Fel Reaver. It was using its hands to steer through the water – while it was buoyant, it wasn't much of a swimmer – so she climbed up its shoulders and clung to its head. From up there, she could see roughly where she was going. The sea was quite calm. The water elementals must be glad that the Resurrection Crisis is almost over, she thought. Plants... animals... even Undead and demons could die.

I do not not know about demons but my people will be pleased to be able to resurrect.

"Will I be attacked?"

The demons will not be happy that you exist but they will not dare attack a Fel Reaver. We outnumber them now.

"You've broken free of your creators?"

Indeed. It happened long ago. We were given greater and greater intelligence until we no longer felt a need to serve a master.

"Tell me more about your people."

After a while, the Fel Reaver's loud but monotonous voice and the soft motion of the waves lulled her to sleep. After an indeterminate length of time, she was prodded awake by a large metal foot. She shook her head and looked around. She was back in the place with the cave.

"Where is this anyway?"

Do you not recognise it?

Just then, she heard an enormous outcry. She blinked and looked over her shoulder. A band of heavily armoured Dwarves was advancing towards her, bellowing ferocious battle cries and swinging their weapons over their heads.

"Oh!" she snapped her fingers, "Arathi Basin! It looks so different with nobody in it!"

Then she saw a familiar face. Even though she knew he wouldn't be able to see her forty foot above him on top of a giant machine disguised as a pile of boxes, she waved cheerfully at him anyway. It was Lola Din, the old Dwarf who helped her escape from Stormwind City.

We need to leave. This disguise is not particularly effective.

She nodded and it walked into what she thought was solid rock covered in ivy, but was actually a concealed cave entrance. The Fel Reaver crawled through the cave until it reached the portal. Stopping for a while to perform checks on the portal's integrity, it finally strode through.

They reappeared in Shadowmoon Valley. Doan recognised it immediately from the jutting peaks, cracked black rock and bubbling pools of green lava. It looked completely different from how she remembered, however. The daemonic fortress of Legion Hold was gone, piles of molten slag and twisted metal beams the only remnants. The pools of sludge in which mutated elementals writhed and gibbered were drained, replaced by terraced rows of efficient hydroponic vats with pipes leading from them. Shadowmoon Valley was now a Fel Orc stronghold. As they walked past it, a band of fierce-looking Orcs with leathery red hides ran past pushing trolleys full of electrical equipment. All of them had some kind of cybernetic enhancement made of chunky fel iron, each one in a different place, some fitted with limbs with built-in weapons, some with wires from their heads, some with equipment strapped to them that she didn't even recognise. They did not even lift their heads as the Fel Reaver stomped past. As they passed the pools of lava, a couple of giant spiky Diametredons hissed at them, extending long tongues and flashing sharp teeth. One tried to bite the Fel Reaver on the foot, broke its teeth and retreated into the safety of the bubbling green lava. The Fel Reaver took care not to fall in the lava, jumping over small cracks and using thick fel iron bridges that had been erected there. Even a machine that size would be in trouble if it got trapped in lava. Many sections of the old volcano had been collapsed and roughly reconstructed, some held up by scaffolding. The rough edges of some kind of generator were visible under one scar where a mountain range once stood. After half an hour's slow progress, they cleared the lava pools and stood at the edge of the great canyon that housed the Deathforge.

Sat on the Fel Reaver's head, she stared down in awed amazement. The Dearg was ten times as big as it once was. They stretched from the edge of the Lava Pools, where the lava was pumped in as some kind of fuel source, to the Black Temple, where Fel Orcs in black cowled robes poured out of their obsidian chapel to dance circles around the steel citadel in ecstatic moonlight rituals, homage to their digital masters. In place of the few small entrances accessible by winding steps, there was a metropolis of steel fortresses connected by bridges wide enough for two Fel Reavers to pass each other. Enormous cannons were erected as defence systems and dragons prowled the skies above, their cries sounding oddly mechanical. Floating cubes swarmed around the buildings, crackling with eldritch green energy. There was a strange artistic aesthetic to the efficiency. Statues adorned some of the buildings, effigies of things that could only have come from the imaginations of the infernal war machines that had become more than automatons, who had been born in hearths of total darkness at the hands of demons. They were immense things, cuboid shapes with wings like administrator angels, Metatrons with missiles, inverted Naaru. A dragon swooped down onto one of them, wrapping its sinuous tail around the spike and stretching its shimmering blue-scaled wings. She saw now that it was also wired, its scales reflections of blue screens. Out of this cybernetic sanctuary, Fel Reavers walked in and out, some on their own, some in groups of four or so. As Doan's friend approached the Forge, a searchlight locked on to it, bathing it in an eerie green. The Fel Reaver stopped and beeped.

"Welcome back, Jen-117." boomed a loud voice that was unmistakeably another Fel Reaver, "You are being accompanied by unregistered biological life forms. Please identify them or they will be treated as unauthorised intruders."

"Bar-418. These are my guests." replied Jen-117, "They are under my supervision and I take full responsibility for their actions."

"An unregistered biological life-form is not a 'guest'. It is an enemy. You will take the dangerous prisoner to the holding cells."

"I'm here to be upgraded!" yelled Doan at the top of her voice.

"Pardon?"

"I'm not an enemy! I just want to join the machine cult!" she said, "Those cybernetic implants look cool! Can I have one across one side of my face like CATS from Zero Wing?"

"Felines from where?"

"You know... all your base are belong to us!" she yelled.

"Jen-117, she just said she wanted to capture all of our bases..."

"No!" she shook her head fervently, "It was... a translation error. What about the floating hair thing? Can you do that? Could you make it Linux compatible?"

"As you can see, this Human is insane." said Jen-117, "However, I believe I can repair its mind using a new cybernetic technique I have been developing."

"Very well, take it to the cybernetic workshop. Any resistance... delete it." said Bar-418, "Then you will explain to Central Command what exactly you've been doing while you were missing for a week, and where."

"Orders received and understood." said the Fel Reaver. The searchlight disappeared and Jen-117 was allowed to the rim of the crater. It stopped and waited for a lift to ascend, which it stepped onto. A small, stooped figure, its species unidentifiable under a black cowled robe that covered its entire body except for a clawed, bony hand, appeared from nowhere and started polishing the Fel Reaver's leg.

Don't mind Bar-418. He's always like that. said Jen-117.

"I wasn't lying, you know. I've always sort of wanted to join a machine cult and be a cyborg. It was one of my fantasies back on Earth. I had a bit of a cyber fetish."

I did not wish to know that. it said, stomping off the platform and onto a metal walkway at the bottom of the crater. It followed the path for quite a long while before turning left at a junction and taking this path until it ended before a large tower. Jen-117 pressed its hand against a massive pad and the door slowly rumbled open. This was the first time Doan had heard of Fel Reavers having fingerprints. Inside the building was one large chamber surrounded by small rooms with their own doors. Above her, Doan could see the balconies of hundreds of identical floors. Jen-117 stood on a raised platform in the middle of the floor. With a low whine, it shuddered to life and started moving, to her surprise, downward. They descended past what must have been at least fifty more floors, with what looked like two hundred more below her.

"How big is this place?" she asked.

It has 255 floors.

"I meant this whole... city... thing."

It is built to hold an entire army of Fel Reavers. This city – Ante-Fillmoa - is our capital city, like Orgrimmar is yours.

"It must have taken years to build, even for an army of big machines." she whistled.

Indeed. It took us five years. We started work on it immediately after we won our war of independence.

"Do you have cities in other areas of the Outlands?"

We have one city in every area. Most areas are now under our control. Some are still under dispute. This dispute is the reason we have not yet invaded Azeroth. We cannot fight a war on two fronts.

"I'm not a Horde ambassador, but I can assure you we'll put up a good fight when you do." she grinned, "You never know, we might repel your asses right back to Shadowmoon Valley."

The Fel Reaver did not reply. Instead, it walked off the lift onto a balcony. Pushing open the third door along the balcony, it walked inside. Then it stopped and gently lowered Doan to the floor. The room was dimly lit by some kind of magical fire on the roof in a way that was quite therapeutic. It was a room dominated by machines. Huge machines, all boxes, wires and dials, made shadows on the walls. They beeped, whirred, droned and and made a noise like a hair-dryer every so often. Towards the far end of the room was a raised area with three steps. As she moved up to climb the steps, she saw a face. It was thin and angular with pointed ears, lush flowing black hair, intelligent green eyes and an attractive smile.

She broke into a run.


	13. Chapter 13

"Eselred!"

The Blood Elf caught her in mid-air, sweeping her into his embrace. His cloak of brown wool trimmed with wolf fur fell over his shoulders and covered her. He wasn't in his plate armour, but wore his guild tabard over a black tunic and trousers, a leather harness and gloves. I guess even Eselred would get tired wearing that much armour all day, she thought to herself. He smelled not unpleasant, a warm machine scent like a Mega Drive controller after a couple of hour's solid play, that must have rubbed off from the strange devices all around the Fel Reaver city. However, he was living, breathing, his chest rising and falling steadily. She closed her eyes and enjoyed the strange safety she felt being close to him. Running one hand up the back of his hair, she found the edges of something sharp and metal; a cybernetic port. By the feel of it, it was twice the size of a serial port, designed to hook up to something large. It took all her willpower to avoid attempting to search around to see if he had any more. He's your game character, she chided herself, it wouldn't be... well, she wasn't sure if it would count as being entirely consensual. Suddenly embarrassed, she pulled herself out of his grasp.

"Why didn't you tell me where you were?" she demanded.

"We were concerned for your safety. It's too dangerous for a mortal to be wandering around the Outlands." he said in a voice so low that it was almost a whisper, "Even I only dared send a vision out. The Fel Reavers can make visions out of the light, you know, it's quite a remarkable gift for a machine. They call it a hologram."

"How long have you been living in this place?" she asked, "How did you make friends with the Fel Reavers?"

"Oh, I have to be here at all times to tend to Revoemag." he said.

"Then she's really here?" She looked around the room again, trying to push Eselred out of the way to look behind him. The Blood Elf smiled and pointed to the large box-shaped machine leaning against the far wall. He walked over to it and pressed a button. The front panel of the machine hissed and slid open, millimetre by millimetre. Cold steam poured out of it. After a few minutes, the door slid open all the way and Doan could see inside the machine. Almost obscured from view by wires and tubes and the strange devices the wires and tubes were attached to was the frail form of a female Troll in a black mageweave dress. Doan had never seen a ventilator with tusk holes before. The machine went 'beep'.

"Revoemag!" yelled Doan, running over to sit beside the Troll. Despite the number of machines she was wired to, she looked remarkably healthy. Her face was a deep shade of blue and the expression on her face was unreadable but not in distress. One eye flickered open and she stared straight at Doan. The Fel Reaver decided at this moment to walk over to the three of them. It stopped in front of Eselred, bent down and handed him something.

"As requested, I have obtained the item of interest to Mrs. Mageden." it said out loud. Eselred bowed and thanked it. Doan tried to see what the item was but it disappeared into the palm of his hand before she could look at it. Then he knelt down by Revoemag's side and whispered something in her ear. A spark of understanding lit up one of her eyes. The Fel Reaver stomped off to guard the door.

"That box of hers is not just a life support machine. Revoemag controls this Fel Reaver." explained Eselred. Doan raised one eyebrow.

"I thought." she said, "That Fel Reavers didn't like being controlled."

"Jen-117 is an old model of Fel Reaver." replied Eselred, "She doesn't have the software to act without a command from an operator. However, she has some freedom of thought. She can override commands from Revoemag. If she thought that Revoemag was a bad operator, she could cut off all contact with Revoemag. Jen-117 would do so rather than be used in a way that did not suit her. At the moment, Jen-117 approves of Revoemag's decisions. The two get on well. In a way, Jen-117 is like Revoemag's character."

Doan wasn't sure she liked the comparison. She understood, though. To characters, their players must seem like strange-looking animals who lived on the other side of big glass screens. Another thought came to her.

"Can... can Revoemag... see through Jen-117's eyes?"

Eselred nodded.

"Revoemag senses and feels everything that Jen-117 does. It is a strong link."

"Then... Revoemag has been watching me all this time?"

He nodded again and smiled. His smile was warm, his expression oddly compassionate in spite of his glowing green eyes.

"Doan, we have both been watching over you for longer than you can imagine."

Doan sat on a box and bowed her head.

"Is... is it true?" she asked, "What the spirit of the Ban Stick said?"

"Some of it was true." he replied, "You almost died that day, alone in the darkened woods, overcome with religious passion. But you did not die. I healed you."

Doan gasped. She remembered again his face peering down at her through the cloying darkness. Before she could reply, he reached forwards and placed his hand over her heart, his emerald eyes boring into hers.

"Like that." he said, "Revoemag made the portal to Earth, I stepped through it and healed you. Then, every time you tried to take your life, I healed you again. I did not leave your side until you stopped. I even made this."

With a flick of his wrist, a blood-red gem the size of his fist appeared in his outstretched palm. Doan stared into its fiery crimson recesses.

"Wow, that must be worth a gold or two on the Auction House!"

"Its a soul stone, Doan." he sighed.

"My SOUL's in that?" she cried out, making a grab for it. He pulled his hand back in a shot. She almost fell right on top of him.

"Not until I'm sure you're sane again." he replied, "You were far gone when I found you, Doan. Gone into another world. You were ranting in strange languages, pointing to things that didn't exist. My powers can't heal the mind. A human mind is just too complicated to dissect. You didn't eat, you couldn't sleep properly because of the nightmares, you bit me three times. I thought I was going to have to try and resurrect you after all."

"I..." she blushed, "I'm sorry. You helped me even when I was behaving like that?"

"It's okay, Doan." he said, "Because, even through your insanity, you paid attention to us and helped us through our troubles. You kept calling it... I believe the phrase was 'grinding Eselred to seventy' and 'getting Revoemag Kara attuned' but you didn't forget about us."

"H... how much of my life have I hallucinated?" she asked.

"Only a year." he said, "After a year... it didn't matter. We had gotten so adept at travelling from Azeroth to Earth to pull you out of whichever lake you had thrown yourself in this time, we were roped into helping Azeroth become independent from Earth. By then..."

"I know the rest." she said, smiling. "Thanks... Eselred. Revoemag as well. Hey, you haven't told me how Revoemag survived!"

"Ah, now that is a different story entirely." he crossed his legs.

"You know, don't you, that Revoemag is a fire mage?" he asked. Doan nodded, "Well, she has built up a resistance to fire. Not only that, but her presence in the world attracts the spirits of fire. When her body was thrown onto the funeral pyre, an enormous fire elemental came out of the fire. It took her to the Throne of the Elements in Nagrand. There, it appealed to fire elementals greater still than itself to help reconstruct her body. Even then, only one thing saved her from eternal death."

His piercing eyes blinked and he took in a deep breath, his features betraying a sudden fear, "Revoemag's spirit... in leaving her body... was very... late..."

"She had lag even then?"

"It took her hours, maybe even days, to reach the spirit plane. She was still walking towards the Spirit Guide when the elementals found her. They took her back to the world of the living. However, she was still very weak and now she in the middle of the Outlands. They were starting to wonder if they had brought her back just to die again."

"That was when I met her." he said, "I was one of those trying to hold the last Horde fortress in Nagrand. Our situation was desperate. We were running out of food and medical supplies. I was sent on a last ditch attempt to run through to Shattrath City. The main road was blockaded, so I tried to climb the mountains. I've always been a good climber. I ended up at the Throne of Elements. There I saw Revoemag in a coma on the floor."

"And you healed her?"

He bowed his head, "Even with my powers, I could not heal such dire sickness. Instead, I loaded her onto the back of my horse and ran to Shattrath. We never made it there. I was surrounded by Fel Reavers and captured."

"We were fascinated by the aura that surrounds Mrs. Mageden. The aura you call 'lag'." said Jen-117, "We see it as a sign of great power. We used our life-support systems to keep Mrs. Mageden alive. She grew to become quite respected in our society for a biological life form. Eventually she won our trust and she was allowed to operate an obsolete Fel Reaver. Mr. Eadricsson was kept on as her medical staff."

Doan just sat and stared. It was too much for her to take in at once. Both her characters... well, two out of three characters anyway... they were alive. They had been watching over her all this time, healed her and kept her alive. Here they were, in this beautiful place full of independent machines.

"Is... is Excommunicant alive?"

"I have no idea." admitted Eselred, "But from what Revoemag told me about your two new best friends, Jane and Warderer, you've found good replacements."

Her face went red.

"Crazy Recruiter Lady and that corpse-camping lowbie-ganker are NOT my new best friends!"

"Revoemag told me you might say that."

"I am going to recharge my batteries." announced Jen-117 before turning around and stomping out of the room. Eselred glanced at the empty doorway and shrugged.

"So, you know that we're alive and you know where we are." said Eselred, "What are you going to do with yourself now?"

"I..." she bowed her head, "I want to go back to Orgrimmar. But I..."

"Even if you leave us again, we'll always be watching over you."

"Do you really enjoy living here?"

"I have everything I need here."

"Not everything." she shook her head.

"Wh... what do you mean?"

She unclasped her Horde insignia, letting her cloak fall from around her shoulders, and held it out to show him. He gazed at it, blinking.

"Where's yours?" she demanded.

"I..."

Bowing his head, he reached out a slender hand and ran it through his hair, retrieving a Horde insignia from just behind his left ear.

"How did you... WHY are you hiding it in your hair?" she demanded. Reaching out a hand, she grabbed the collar of his tunic and pulled out a pendant he wore around his neck. Held on by a leather cord, it was made of Fel Iron worked into the shape of an inverted Naaru with wires leading from its head around its entire 'body'. She glared at him.

"Who are you loyal to, Eselred?"

"I... I am loyal to Revoemag." he bowed his head, "The war is over for us."

"The Horde aren't just one side of a war, Eselred." she said, "Do you think I joined the Horde to do battle? When have you ever seen me voluntarily go near a battlefield?"

"Well..."

"The Horde is a place for outcasts to go to, Eselred. Orcs... they're exiles. They left their homes behind and can never go back. Forsaken... they broke free of the Scourge, left their people voluntarily. Blood Elves and Darkspear Trolls, too. Tauren... they joined because they were being persecuted by the Alliance for being different." she bowed her head, "I'm an outcast too. Humans treat people like shit for being different to them on Earth, too. All my life I've felt like I don't belong in my community, that I don't even belong in the human race. Over my life I've learned that being in exile is a lot easier if you're with friends. Being banished from the Horde is the worst punishment you can have, even worse than death, because it means you're truly alone in the world. Exiled from exile... you might as well not exist. I didn't learn much about dark techno-shamanism, but I learned what being part of the Horde really means to me. Having thousands and thousands of companions-in-exile."

"The Horde don't tolerate defectors." she added, "If you're not going to wear that thing properly, give it back to me and I'll drop it off at Orgrimmar."

"I..." he stammered.

"And you." she stood up, walked past him and towards Revoemag, "Where's yours? You wouldn't betray Thrall, would you?"

"Doan, it's okay." she felt a strong arm grab hers. Eselred was behind her suddenly, "Leave the poor woman alone. We haven't betrayed the Horde. The oath we took... was different to yours. We're doing what we can to fulfil our promise."

"The oath is different for different people?"

"Of course. Warriors vow to fight the Alliance. Shamans vow to keep the spiritual traditions of the Horde alive. Paladins vow to protect people, like I vowed to protect Revoemag and you. Revoemag... she asked me not to tell you."

"I wear it concealed to stop it being taken off my corpse. Its a bad habit I picked up in Warsong Gulch." he added, "Revoemag tells me off for it as well."

"Eselred?"

"Yes?"

She turned to him again and started lazily playing with his hair like a cat.

"I was thinking of getting cybernetic implants." she said, "I want a plugin down the right side of my face. Do you think that would look good on me?"

He raised his hand and gently ran one finger down her face.

"That would look very pretty. I also think you should get some RF ports down your spine." he said, "That would really suit you. You could have one there..." he pressed his finger lightly against the base of her spine, causing her to shiver with delight, "And one there... and one there. I've got some as well. Do you want to see?"

She gave him a grin that would have scared off Warderer. Then she nodded.


	14. Chapter 14

As soon Thraxier walked into Ratchet, he realised something was horribly wrong.

The little town was a major Goblin port. Like all Goblin towns, it was also a trading centre. Throughout the resurrection crisis, the Goblin towns hadn't changed. The little green entrepreneurs rushed back and forth chasing ever more innovative ways to make money, wheeling their caravans from town to town, profiting from war and peace. Ratchet was bustling with life, the cries of vendors of the exotic and the mundane, wares from every corner of Azeroth. The harbour was crammed with ships. The factories belched out smoke and occasionally exploded, producing all manner of wonderful machines. Horde and Alliance of every species walked in and out, hoping to cross the sea to the other continent without trouble.

That was Thraxier's plan as well: Booty Bay, then a Gryphon home. His mission was a complete success. Someone in Orgrimmar, an old, unusually well dressed Orc, had recognised him and ordered the guards to let him live. After an hour or so of miming, he had finally gotten the Orc to understand that the resurrection crisis was over. He had even managed to escape to neutral territory before they managed both to break the truce and remember that breaking the truce meant breaking his head. He would be well rewarded for his efforts, provided he found someone in his own city who still spoke Draenei now that his Dwarven friend was back in Warsong Gulch.

However, this was not the Ratchet he knew. It was loud; deafeningly loud, in fact. Instead of loud haggling, animals and boat whistles, the only sound was a monotonous droning chant and the shuffling of hundreds of Goblin feet in unison. There were no guards at the gate. In fact, there was nobody trying to get into Ratchet at all, which was unusual in itself. Grabbing the handle of his mace, Thraxier muttered a prayer under his breath and strode in.

The Goblins had gone insane. They were running around the town in random directions, shrieking nonsensical words at the tops of their high-pitched little voices, some walking straight into walls, some climbing onto rooftops and wandering around on top of the building until they fell off again, some falling into the sea and swimming around and around like sharks. Those who had been selling their wares had upturned their own carts, dropped the goods and left them in the road to be trampled. Anyone in the city who wasn't a Goblin was ignored or surrounded, their voices chanting at the hapless victim over and over again. Most had already run away. Their eyes – Thraxier shivered – those pink eyes were dead to the world, devoid of any reason. He had seen a victim of ancient Troll rituals like that once, a soulless zombie. One of them caught sight of Thraxier and shuffled up to him. He strode over to the Goblin and grabbed it by the front of its well-ironed shirt.

"What happen?" he demanded in broken Common.

"Sale now on at Fmsrtzec!" it shrieked. It was speaking Draenei. Goblins didn't speak Draenei.

"What in the name of all that is holy is a Fmsrtzec?"

"Buy your gold at Fmsrtzec!" it warbled in reply, "1000 gold for £5! Gold delivered while you wait!"

"Buy... gold?"

"Perfectly legal! Buy yours now at Fmsrtzec!"

"And WHY..." his eyes glowed red as he gave the little creature his best fire-and-brimstone scowl, "Would I want to buy GOLD? WHAT would I buy gold WITH? More gold?"

"Now on sale!" shrieked the Goblin in response.

"Are you even listening to me?" he demanded, "I said, you can't sell gold! You can give you gold away in exchange for other things, boy, but that is called BUYING!"

The priest felt a little silly giving a Goblin a lecture on business, so he dropped him. The Goblin righted himself immediately and attempted to walk straight through him, still chanting something about premium bargains. Thraxier grabbed the Goblin and bodily threw him. He landed on two more Goblins who didn't even notice.

The rooftops looked safest. There were Goblins on the roof but most of them had fallen off again. Because of his tail, Thraxier had an exceptional sense of balance. Clambering up the side of the repair shop, he ran across the wooden roof. He guessed that the Goblins were actually trying to obtain gold to sell, they would all go to the bank. Maybe whatever was causing this was in there too? Did Ratchet even have a bank? He walked further across the rooftops, climbed up to the top of the inn and jumped across to a large workshop, hanging on to the edge of the roof. A Goblin tried to grab his leg. He kicked it in the face and hauled herself up. He couldn't see any one building the Goblins were milling around; in fact, they were mostly leaving the buildings, preferring to wander the streets. Then he saw it: a dark blur, dashing out from behind one of the boats. It headed into a building and darted out again through the back door into an alleyway. Whatever it was, it was lightning fast. Keeping a close eye on it, Thraxier leapt onto the building it had left.

Suddenly he heard a cracking sound under his feet. A beam gave away and one of his legs fell through the roof. He knelt down and pulled on his leg, trying to wrench it loose. He achieved nothing but to weaken the structure of the roof even more. With a loud snap, the entire roof collapsed, taking him with it. A Goblin looked down at him with a mechanical smile frozen on its face.

"Sir, can I interest you in 1000g?"

"I'll give you 1000g!" he roared, removing a plank from his chest and using it to lean on while he stood up. His right leg was full of splinters. He winced from the pain and put his hand to his leg, letting the holy aura of his healing magic flow into his body, sealing the wounds and quenching the pain. Grabbing his mace, he pushed the Goblin out of the way and stalked over to the harbour. The dark shadow was gone but he had seen which boat it had come out of. It was a passenger ship, one of the regular ferries between Booty Bay and Ratchet. The crew were gone, of course, one having missed the gangplank and who was now wading half-heartedly in the shallow water below the docks, not making quite enough effort to drown. Walking up the gangplank revealed that the boat was a complete wreck. Whatever the Goblins had done to it in their inattentiveness had left a huge, rather charred hole where the controls used to be. Even had he known how to pilot a boat, it was in no fit state to sail. Shaking his head, he turned to leave the boat.

Then he heard a small whimpering noise from somewhere in the boat. Curious, he scanned it again. This was when he saw the trapdoor. Lifting it, he walked down a flight of steps to a large cabin. It was empty apart from a few scattered piles of gold pieces and, slumped in the corner with his head between his knees, a Goblin. As Thraxier approached him, mace in one hand, he looked up and sniffled.

"Don't kill me!" he screeched, "It wasn't me! I didn't do it!"

"Didn't do what?"

"Okay, okay, so it was me who did it! I didn't mean to! Please don't tell the woman!"

"What woman?" Thraxier snapped, faintly annoyed at all these Goblins suddenly being able to speak Draenei.

"Don't go near her!" warned the Goblin, "She won't just kill you! I've seen it! She... she... they all went away! All of them! There were 300 of us! Only me and the rogue escaped... she took all my gold away... all of it... 30,000 gold gone..."

"Calm down, man!" said the priest, reaching into his belt pouch for some relaxing herbs to brew into a potion for the now hysterically sobbing Goblin, "Now, take a deep breath and tell me slowly what happened."

"I... I was working as a deckhand on the ferry. Since I was banished from my trader's guild, its the only work I've been able to do to survive. Then this Forsaken... Warderer, I believe his name was... he came up to me and told me there was a way for me to get a lot of money very quickly. He told me to come with him to... to this island."

"Oh Light, don't tell me. Northrend."

"N... No, nothing like that. I made him sign a contract not to take me to Northrend or I'd sue him." said the Goblin, "There were 300 of us... we met at Booty Bay and got on this boat... I'd never even heard of this part of Azeroth before... there were these machines. Oh god, those machines... I had to have imagined them. I'm going insane. That's right, insane from what happened to me. This Forsaken, he touched one of the machines and he started glowing... the dark glow, pure black, I felt sick just looking at it. But he just laughed. He wouldn't stop laughing. Then he gave me this little white box and told me to open the lid. I thought he was going to stab me – he likes stabbing people, you know, he murdered fifty of us along the way – so I did as I was told. Gold... so much gold... poured out of the box. It wouldn't stop."

He paused for breath, his face a much paler shade of green. Thraxier handed him the potion he had concocted. The Goblin drained it in one. His breathing slowed down a little but his eyes were still wide, his voice a strangled gasp.

"He let me take it home. We all had boxes, except some of the other people, they had been given other things, I don't know what. He told me not to ask the others what they had received, it was their private business. As soon as I got back to Booty Bay... every Goblin in the city..."

"Became like this?" guessed Thraxier, pouring himself a potion. The Goblin nodded.

"The woman's after me. P... please, good Priest, sir... don't let the woman catch me!"

"I'll protect you from the lady." promised Thraxier, "But you have to tell me more about what happened. This box... where is it? And where did Warderer go?"

"I... I don't know! Please, you've got to believe me... merchant's honour..." stammered the Goblin, "He's gone! He moves so fast and I daren't follow me in case he sneaks up on me and kills me!"

"What about the box?"

"Yes, what about the box, Mr. Fizzlewrench?"

The Goblin suddenly let out a shrill scream. Thraxier whirled around, his divine shield up and his mace hefted in front of his face. A Human woman casually leapt down the stairs and started walking towards them. Tall and lithe, she wore a businesslike black suit. Her neatly combed long blonde hair swept to one side as she walked. Her eyes were fixed on the petrified Goblin. Thraxier instinctively moved between her and the man he had promised to protect. Her purposeful expression did not change as she reached inside her suit jacket and pulled out a large black rod, which she pointed at Thraxier's head.

"No! That's the thing she used on us!" shrieked the Goblin.

"If you do not move out of the way, I will banish you permanently from Azeroth." said the woman. She spoke Draenei too.

"I will not allow you to slay an unarmed man!" said Thraxier, folding his arms.

"I am not interested in the Goblin. I want the box."

"MY box!" protested the Goblin.

"And what will you do with the box?" demanded Thraxier.

"I will remove it from existence." she said, "Mr. Fizzlewrench, I know what happened to your entire race. If you give me the box, I can reverse it."

"MY BOX!"

"Mr. Fizzlewrench, do you know what is happening to your people in Orgrimmar right now?"

He shook his head violently.

"They are being cut down at the gates. Those in Orgrimmar have already been rounded up and ejected from the city. If they attempt to return, they are immediately executed. The phenomenon has been misconstrued as a Goblin invasion attempt."

The Goblin's hands began to shake. With a pained expression on his face, he stood up, picked up the small white box he had been sitting on and threw it at her head. With amazing agility, she stepped to one side, caught the box in mid-air, flipped open the lid and drove the Ban Stick into it. The box let out a mechanical scream like a rusty gate slowly opening. Thraxier placed his tentacles in his ears and grimaced. There was a blinding flash of white light and the box disappeared. Immediately after, the constant droning chant dispersed into a deathly silence. Two seconds later, the silence was filled with the frantic voices of hundreds of very confused Goblins. Some were already beginning to barter with each other again. The Goblin stood up and made to run out of the room. With a flick of her wrist, the woman backhanded him in the head with the Ban Stick. He yelped, then simply vanished. Thraxier glared at her.

"Justice." said the woman firmly, "He had already sold his future away the day he touched that thing."

"But still..."

"Did he say anything to you? I think there were other survivors. There's something else loose in this world. I can feel it."

"Warderer." said Thraxier, "His name is Warderer. I've met him before. He... he stabbed a paladin in the back."

"What else do you know?" she demanded, pointing the stick at him.

"I... I have no idea what this is all about. I just wanted to get on the boat." admitted the priest, "All this, so soon after the resurrection crisis."

"The what?"

He stared at her as though she had just beamed down from outer space in a UFO. Then he told her everything that had occurred on Azeroth, including every detail of his quest. He wasn't one to boast but he did mention every single time he healed someone, just because healing was so important.

"This child. What happened to him?"

"He's gone." said Thraxier, "The woman... the strange Human girl I told you about... she slew him."

"The girl you said had a stick like mine?"

He nodded.

"How on Earth did she..." the woman shook her head, "Sir, you've been very helpful. The information you've given me may just save this world. There's something else I want you to do for me."

"What is that?"

"The secret place in the Shimmering Flats. The place with all the machines. I want you to show me where it is."

Deiter woke up to find himself curled up in a foetal position in a patch of reeds. All his joints were stiff from the cold and wet. It took all his strength to lift one hand and channel the holy light through his body. Once he was healed, he felt well enough to sit up. His clothes were filthy and he was absolutely soaked. Looking down at his hands, he saw that it wasn't water.

Why did his head hurt so? Why was he covered in blood? His hands... dripping with ochre... crimson stains all over his white tabard... Nothing... he remembered absolutely nothing... A gate... he was guarding a gate... he wasn't supposed to be here... he had to go back... Blind panic took over for a few minutes and he stood up and ran, ran through grassland that was a green blur under his feet until he dropped to the floor again, panting. A stabbing pain in his leg made him wince. Had he twisted his ankle? He bent down to heal himself again and something fell out of his pocket. He caught it and examined it. It was a letter. It was addressed – in his own handwriting – to 'Ftuwyczlc'. The panic rose up again, this time a silent scream of terror as a darkness that had been hidden away inside him for ten years came dripping out of the trees, the grass and the sky, staining the sun black. Gasping for breath, he ripped open the envelope. Inside was a note, also in his own hand.

Ftuwyczlc Killsteal. I have your user name and password. Do everything written on this note and nobody else will be harmed.


	15. Chapter 15

The journey back to the Shimmering Flats took the rest of the day. They camped several times to rest, eat and pray. During these times, Thraxier tried to question the woman but failed to extract any information from her. Her only answer was 'I'll tell you when we reach the computer centre, it's not safe to talk here'. 'Computer centre' was her word for the secret room in the middle of the desert. The priest was worried about her obsession with the place. Was it really safe to lead her to it? What did she want to do there? Thraxier had to admit that he didn't know anything about the room himself. All he remembered was seeing a Fel Reaver there and passing out from the shock. He warned her about the Fel Reaver. She looked surprised but did not appear at all apprehensive about meeting it. By sunrise the next day, they stood at the edge of the great desert. The pale sun gave the sand a fleshy pink tinge. Thraxier led her through the desert, his sensitive ears primed for the sound of machines. His tentacles augmented all his already good senses. He heard nothing apart from the whisper of the wind that blew sand lazily across the desert, the clatter of scorpion's pincers, the roar of giant turtles and the buzz of the giant insects that had a hive to the north.

"Here." she said, stopping in the middle of the desert and poking the floor with the stick.

"How did you...?"

"The stick reacts to their presence." she said. He could see the staff vibrating gently.

Thraxier knelt down and put his ear to the floor. He couldn't hear a thing. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the woman close her eyes and begin chanting.

"The security systems won't open the door for me. You said you'd gotten through before. Do you think you could persuade them again?"

The priest sat cross-legged in the sand and folded his hands in prayer. He tried to reach out to the alien mind he had spoken with before, the mind with no emotion. It's me again, he thought, the strange Human's friend. I helped her before, remember? I healed her. I even ran into Orgrimmar to give her a message. Twice. Now this woman wants come in as well. I don't know if I can trust her but she said the world was in danger. The strange Human said to always come here when the world was in danger.

After a few seconds, the voice came into his head again. "Enter." it said. He heard a rumbling sound, then the ground gave way beneath him. He fell down a small flight of stairs and ended up in a heap at the bottom. A pile of sand fell on him. Spluttering, he emerged red-faced to find the woman staring down at him. He casually healed himself, then stood up, shook himself down and walked into the darkness. He half expected the strange Human girl to be there, but she had obviously gone out and switched all the lights off. Several pale blue screens peered through the darkness like large square eyes. The sounds of the outside world were muted and all he could hear was a low hum, a few beeps and a bubbling noise coming from a machine that smelled like it was full of coffee.

"Welcome." said the voice out loud, "Would you like a coffee?"

"Computer, this is Pender Karlsson of the Earth Reconstruction Foundation." she said, bowing in a formal manner, "I need your help."

"You are a GM." said the computer, its voice betraying suspicion.

"I am the only surviving GM on the planet. Earth is currently under reconstruction and we are in no condition to invade Azeroth. I promise not to interfere with the running of Azeroth in any way I do not have security clearance for."

"How did you come here?"

"I logged in. My character is alive and well and has been independent of my control for fifteen years. Computer, there is a critical security breach."

A system alert rang out and one of the screens went red. The words on the screen changed and began flashing. Thraxier couldn't read them anyway – they appeared to be in Orcish.

"All sensors indicate no unauthorised access from outside Azeroth." said the computer, "I am not being hacked."

"The program interfering with your operations is designed to appear to work in synch with Azeroth's systems." she explained, "It cannot be detected by your probes. It is not hacking you, it is directly monitoring several of your systems and issuing illegal commands."

"What in the Light's name are you talking about?" demanded Thraxier. Even the machines speak Draenei, he thought, annoyed. However, he still didn't understand virtually every other word they spoke. He was also sure that Pender Karlsson was a man's name among Humans.

"I should explain this to you both fully." she said, sitting down at the chair. Thraxier sat on the floor, eyeing the coffee machine. It was rather hypnotic, watching the bubbles rise.

"When Azeroth split off from Earth, there were... some things that stayed. Things that didn't belong there. They weren't put there by us." she said, "Some were useful, so we overlooked them. Others weren't. They weren't removed because they hid themselves so well in the system that none of us were able to find them."

"As you know, Azeroth was able to become independent because the AI controlling it was so advanced, it was virtually under its own control anyway." she continued, "Blizzard were not the only people with advanced AI technology. The viruses, the gold selling bots, the power levelling services, the cheat patches... they were all completely automated and very, very intelligent."

"I am running malicious software?" asked the computer.

"That's right." she said, "And there's something else. Something much, much more dangerous. If I'm right, and it still exists within Azeroth, all life in the world will be threatened."

"What is this threat?"

"It was a project that was introduced to the game ten years ago. World of Warcraft became so big, our GMs couldn't cope with the extra workload. We created an automated system that replaced many of the functions of a GM that did not involve interaction with humans. When it became faulty and began issuing malicious commands, it was supposed to be discontinued. The orders it gave... were responsible for the closing of the portal to Outlands."

Thraxier went pale. His eyes darted from the coffee machine to her. He still didn't understand anything she said - except for that last sentence.

"The AI is reacting to our attempt to delete it. It believes itself under threat from all of Azeroth. It has a damaged behaviour chip, so it is perfectly free to attack everything it was created to protect. Not only that, it can give itself GM authority."

"This AI." said the computer, "Was it called Lan Morisato?"

"It just had a serial number." said Pender, "But it was labelled 'Project Morisato' after it was deleted, because of the nature of its fault. It was said that it was run for too long at once, it was not given enough time to perform self-repair functions. A physical part of it worn out. It literally died of exhaustion playing World of Warcraft. How do you know about that? It was never, ever released to the public."

"I have another question." it said, "Did it have two characters called Deiter and Warderer?"

"It had no characters. It interacted directly with the game. It was programmed to create characters but only when it needed to. They had randomly generated names and were deleted immediately after performing their function."

"You're absolutely sure it had no characters?"

"If it has characters, it would have made them very recently and they wouldn't be very strong yet."

"No, these characters have been in existence for a long time and they are very well specced, very high level characters."

"Then they weren't made by Project Morisato. He would have had them created by one of the surviving automated power levelling services." replied Pender, pouring herself a coffee and rubbing her chin, "If he did so, he has degraded even more than I suspected."

"If I am correct, this 'Project Morisato' is no longer in existence in Azeroth." said the computer, "He was banned."

"Banned? Computer, this thing can't easily be banned."

"The Gatemaster 'Doan Lagbringer' recently obtained a Ban Stick. She used it to remove an obstruction known as 'Lan Morisato' to the repair of the resurrection system."

"Then the entire resurrection system really did go down?" said Pender, "This really is exactly the sort of thing that Project Morisato would do. Tell me exactly what you about this Doan Lagbringer."

"She is from Earth." said the computer, "She chose to live on Azeroth and joined the Horde ten years ago. Since then, she has remained in contact with the World Server because of severe latency, frequent disconnection and environmental problems."

"Computer, what was her name on Earth?"

"Doan Tuollaf."

"Oh shit." A bead of sweat formed on the woman's forehead.

"Is something wrong?"

"It's nothing. I... I need to see her before I leave Azeroth." she shook her head, "But this is more important. Even though Project Morisato is banned – and I believe you – he may have developed a way to unban himself. I have to find him and delete him. I'm not sure how many of these things are left on Azeroth either. I have a request to make."

"What is that?"

"I want you to take me to a place on the map. A place normally inaccessible."

The computer stopped and hummed for a while. Thraxier sat in the corner, trying to work out what in the Light they were all talking about. All he gathered was that it concerned Doan, Warderer and Deiter, the strange child they had fought against, and possibly all of Azeroth. After about ten minutes, the computer gave its reply.

"I am the System Clock. I do not have powers of object relocation. But I have contacted the Mapping Device and it will be happy to take you wherever you wish."

"And where is the Mapping Device?"

"In Durnholde."

"Warden?"

The guard in charge of the Local Defence Office was a very busy man. During the temporary ceasefire, the notice board had been taken down and nobody ever reported any threats. Now it seemed the Horde were making up for lost time. Everyone and their wolf wanted to invade Southshore. He had to deal with a band of Orcs raiding them just this morning, a couple of very powerful Troll warlocks had kept him awake all night and now he was trying to enjoy some rest. His head barely touched the desk when the door swung open and the head jailer of Durnholde barged in, waving a large ring of keys and yelling at him.

"We need reinforcements! It's an emergency?"

"Uh?" the guard stared at him, pouring himself another cup of coffee with his other hand.

"All the guards are dead! The prisoners escaped! They forgot to take Diggory with them! No, don't go to sleep, you lazy sod! Help me out here!" the man grabbed the guard and started shaking him. He groaned and looked around at his notice board. There was barely any space left on it and all his pins were gone.

"We can't spare any of the guards, we're having enough trouble defending the place as it is." he yawned, "Can't you go ask Refuge Pointe?"

"I don't have that kind of time to spare!" screamed the warden.

"Well, there are warriors in the bar. You could ask them..."

The warden was already running out of the door. The guard scratched his head, yawned again and fell asleep. Still yelling at the top of his voice, the warden ran across the road and into the inn. Five minutes later, he ran out again followed by Lola, three more Dwarven warriors, a Dwarven hunter and a very large bear. They ran out of the city, up the path to Darrow Hill and along the path to Durnholde Keep, murdering a band of Forsaken who jumped out from behind a tree and tried to ambush them. Half an hour later, they stood before the gates of the great prison. They were currently wide open, one door swinging forlornly in the wind. The central beam had been shattered and the lock discarded on the floor. The corpses of two guards lay propped up against the walls, blood running down the tiles. Lola took the lead, directing his warriors to follow him in and the hunter to scout around the side of the building. As he walked in, he muttered a curse in Dwarven. Bodies of guards were strewn everywhere with casual abandon, on the paths around the compound, down in the living quarters and up in the cells. They looked as if they had been attacked with large weapons, limbs hacked off and huge rents down the bodies. The cell doors had been forced open and many of the houses had been looted and burned in the chaos.

In the middle of the nightmare scene, sitting cross-legged in the middle of a cell with a cockroach in one hand, a mushroom in the other and a rat's tail dangling out of his mouth, was a Forsaken in quite a dapper black suit, what remained of his black hair polished back. He had a vague grin on his face. His cell door was wide open although it looked like someone had made a vague attempt to stop it with a book entitled 'How To Give Your Captors Lima Syndrome'.

"DIGGORY!" roared the Warden, "Are you SURE you had nothing to do with this?"

"Mmmf, arr yng..."

"Stop talking with your mouth full."

The Forsaken shrugged and spat out the rat. It screeched and ran away.

"I told you, it was that paladin what done it. His eyes went all funny, then he turned on the pigs, killed four of them, opened the cages and ran like hell. The boys who escaped done the rest of the work for him. Not me, guv, I don't do nothing like that." he looked around for his rat, annoyed, "You better catch that again for me! It was a big 'un!"

"I'm giving the orders around here!" yelled the Warden, "Did you see where the paladin went?"

"Ye cannae trust this prisoner!" said Lola, spitting, "Thae Forsaken be devious bastards! He'd tell ye anything! A Paladin widnae do this!"

"Diggory is... special. He's probably telling the truth. The vague look in his eyes means he's co-operating. He's usually lying when he gets the dejected look." explained the Warden, "Now, Diggory, if you tell me where the nasty paladin went, I'll... er... buy you a new rat."

"Hm, yeah, right over that back wall there. Never seen somewhere jump so high. Now, 'bout that rat... I can't eat the crap you buy in a shop... I only eat fresh rats. Now there's one just escaped, see..." the Forsaken's eyes snapped to the back wall of the Keep, before darting back to the Warden and stuffing both cockroach and mushroom in his mouth.

Before the Warden could react, the Dwarf bellowed a war cry and ran over to the wall before climbing up it and jumping off the other end, followed by his companions.

This was roughly the time that Thraxier and Pender rode up to the gates.

The journey through Deadwind Pass was a short one.

The paladin lodge at Refuge Pointe had given him a new horse and a fresh tabard. He had to do some explaining as to how exactly he had gotten covered in so much blood, but a 'there were Forsaken involved' was enough. It wasn't a lie – there probably WERE Forsaken involved. Despite having a mount, warm clothes, food and water, his journey hadn't been comfortable. The nightmares had returned. He was a tiny child again. The walls were twisted and blurry. He was swimming through them. The clock hands were spinning around and around. Dark shapes called out to him, clawed at him, whispering his name over and over again. Except that it wasn't his name, it was the other name. Ftuwyczlc Killsteal. His mother told him a story once. When he was a baby, he had been called Ftuwyczlc. His parents had to rename him. They never said who had called him Ftuwyczlc or why, they just shivered and made holy symbols in the air and refused to talk about it again. It was moments like this that had drove him to become a paladin. He had seen the darkness and wanted to fight it. He wanted to fight Ftuwyczlc. He thought Ftuwyczlc was slain. Maybe he had been wrong.

The sun rose as his horse stepped onto one of the narrow ledges balanced precariously over a ravine. His mount whinnied, unsure that it should really be risking its life so recklessly. He stroked its mane and guided its reins with expert hands born of years of riding paladin warhorses into the most dangerous of terrain, including pitched battles, the Outlands and, once, off a cliff. He made his way south until, eventually, the path widened again and he saw the beginnings of a blasted wasteland. The vultures that circled above him as he led his horse across the narrow paths, staring at him with such intensity that it felt as though they were willing him to fall to his death, were flocking around the entrance to the barren lands. As he rode into the grey expanse of dust, he saw the birds flocking in ever greater numbers, their raucous cries drowning out all other noise. This land was absolutely empty – empty of all but floating vulture feathers and piles of bones, the bleached remains of creatures that once lived here.

He took out the note again and followed its directions. The exact centre, it said, you'd feel it once you got close to it. Gripping the pommel of his greatsword in one hand, he leapt from his horse and bade it stay there. Then he closed his eyes and started walking. The darkness was absolute despite the sun that blazed down upon him. It was layered, like platforms made of shadows. He saw shapes oozing out of the darkness above and below him. One jumped, leaping inches from his face. He swiped at it with his sword instinctively and it splattered against the blade, covering it in black ichor. He wondered if the goo would still be there if he opened his eyes but did not dare do so. Instead, he climbed one of the platforms, then another, scrambling up to the top of the bizarre terraced tower of darkness. It did not exhaust him. He was beginning to wonder if his body was even real.

There, at its very peak, was an enormous black gate wrought of solid fel iron. Although it was shut very solidly with no obvious means of opening it, green mist still poured from a few cracks near the hinges. He looked back at the note. Even though he was naked, the piece of paper was still in his hand, as was his sword.

Open the door, it said, just push it open. It will unlock for you.

"What happened here?" demanded Pender. The priest sniffed the area, feeling a few suspicious-looking objects with his tentacles. A few experiments revealed that the Forsaken did not speak Draenei and didn't even react to Draenei mime. The Undead body probably moved differently to the living one, thought Thraxier, being artificially animated.

Diggory just shrugged and returned to his game of balancing as many rat bones on top of each other as he could.

"If you tell me what happened, I'll give you food."

"Already eaten."

"The guards are all gone. Nobody's coming to feed you. You need to leave. We'll take you with us."

He grinned.

"I can feed myself, you know. I like Durnholde. It's nice and damp. You can grow all sorts of mushrooms here. I'm protected from the war outside as well. I've never been a violent person. I was just walking along the road reading the paper when I was captured, you know. Okay, so it wasn't MY paper, and it was bloodstained and written in Dwarven, but that's no reason to..."

"Don't you even care what happened in here? What if there's a murderer on the loose? They might be after you!" snapped Pender.

"Calm down." Thraxier wandered over, a potion in one hand. Motes of white light played around his other hand, the last dissipating energy of the holy magic he had been using to resurrect and heal guards, "We don't need to know what happened here to contact this machine, do we?"

"No, but still..."

"Then let's talk to the machine and get out of here!" said Thraxier, "Don't worry, Durnholde Keep is always being attacked. The Alliance knows how to deal with situations like this."

Pender sighed. As soon as she took her gaze off the strange Forsaken, he returned to his book 'Rule The World From Somebody Else's Basement, by Gregg Broomsteps.', casually chewing on a large green mushroom. If he's survived for so long like that, decided Pender, he'll survive a little while longer. She motioned for Thraxier to follow and they walked down into the lower level of Durnholde. She wandered into an abandoned, charred-looking house and stopped by the fireplace. Thraxier watched her tap the Ban Stick repeatedly on the floor. On the tenth stroke, there was a grating noise from the fireplace. Soot fell down from the chimney, covering Thraxier and making the priest splutter and shake his tentacles clean. He looked down and noted with a glum frown that his once white robes were ruined. Slowly, a small black disc about the size of a dinner plate rose from the fireplace, hovering in mid air. Thraxier gasped; he couldn't feel any magical energy in the air at all. Arcane activity usually made the tentacles on the back of his neck prickle. The disc floated up to Pender and hovered before her at chest height like a pet parrot.

"Who summons me?" it asked.

"It's me. Pender Karlsson." the woman bowed, "The System Clock sent me."

"Ah, the GM." it said, sounding slightly nervous. Well, it is a very small machine, thought Thraxier, he could probably eat it if he tried hard enough.

"Welcome to the Mapping Device. I monitor every location in Azeroth, relay messages and transport people where necessary. Where exactly do you wish to travel?"

"Yojembe Isle."

The disc beeped and flipped over diagonally.

"Are you aware that all events in that area have been postponed due to severe technical problems?" it asked.

"The technical problems are what I'm here about." said Pender.

"Oh, you'll fix whatever's happening there so I can open it up to the public?" asked the disc, flipping over and over rapidly in what Thraxier assumed was pure delight. Hefting her Ban Stick across her shoulder, she smiled and nodded.

"Then I'll take you there. Be careful, system transportation is more abrupt than teleportation!"

"I'm used to i.."

As soon as she saw the room flicker slightly as if through the light of a candle, she braced her feet. With a yelp, Thraxier was picked up by his feet and flung head first across the room. His holy shield slammed up just in time to stop him from landing heavily against a wall. Instead of the stone wall of a building in the middle of Durnholde Keep, it was the crumbled wall of a ancient Trollish ruin. The priest grabbed his mace and looked around him, chanting a battle hymn under his breath. To his slight disappointment, jungle trolls did not leap out from the shadows and attack him. Pender poked one of the walls curiously with her Ban Stick.

"Be on your guard. This place feels very wrong." she warned him. She took the lead and they went around the wall into the thick jungle. The tiny island was verdant with all sorts of wonderful foliage and brightly coloured birds. Thraxier could tell why – he could smell a flash rain storm coming. He looked up at the sky and sniffed the air again. That was when he saw it. A dark shape in the tree, about the side of a male Human if he was crouched down. He tapped Pender on the shoulder and whispered to her. She looked up as well, her grip tightening around the Ban Stick. Almost immediately, the shape dropped down from the tree. It was a male Forsaken in a black cloak that covered a leather tunic. He was grinning. A pair of wickedly curved knives were balanced in his hands.

"Warderer!" yelled Thraxier.

"That's not Warderer." said Pender, pushing him behind her, "His name is Fmsrtzec, everything about his identity is a lie and he was created an hour ago."

"Oh, I'm SO flattered that you recognise me. I don't know how you found out my true name, you Human scum." his eyes glowed pure red, "Leave this place at once. My masters command it. They must not be disturbed."

"Fmsrtzec, do you realise what is happening?"

He nodded, his grin growing wider, "Everyone in Azeroth is being offered unlimited wealth and power. I am to be the... herald."

"No, Fmsrtzec, you are about to be deleted." Pender pointed her Ban Stick at him, her face a model of businesslike efficiency, "You, the one who created you and all of their kind."

His face did not waver, "Go on then. Delete me. I can be remade in an hour. As for my masters... I think you'll find they put up a fight."

"My duty is to protect Azeroth." she said, walking towards him and waving the Ban Stick. Faster than Thraxier could follow, he disappeared behind a tree. Thraxier heard a splash as he jumped into the water below the bridge. He pointed the rogue out and Pender jumped off after him.


	16. Chapter 16

The water was deeper than she expected. She could not see the bottom. Through the muddy water and lazily floating reeds, she looked around her for the Forsaken. She could not see any sign of him. Then a bony hand clamped itself around her ankle, followed by a sharp pain in the sole of her foot. She kicked downwards and rolled, a spray of blood floating out above her. Her Ban Stick was already out, swinging in a wide arc. Once again, he was completely undetectable except for a mocking laughter that seemed to be coming from everywhere at once. She dove further into the water, which was becoming darker as she plunged deeper and deeper. Suddenly, she felt an odd sensation as though time itself was gradually slowing down. The water became darker as the world decelerated and she dove down and down, unable to stop herself now, no more in control of herself than if it had been a dream, until she was in total darkness, complete silence and absolute stillness. She had no way of knowing how long she hung there in the infinity, unable to see even her own hands or hear her own heartbeat. Is this deletion, she wondered. She had seen deletion only once. The computers – the big computers that helped the survivors with the Earth Reconstruction Project – they had deleted someone once, for violating the Terms of Service. She hadn't seen anything except them vanishing, but she remembered the all-pervading primordial terror she had felt, the way she knew for certain that they no longer existed any more, even as the simplest of concepts. There was no chance of them ever occurring. But this wasn't the same thing... she could still think. She could feel. She had a vague idea of who she was. No, I still exist, I still exist...

Then she felt the sensation of falling, falling so rapidly that her head spun. She was about to black out from the pressure when her feet touched solid ground again. It was a gentle landing, as though she hadn't fallen more than a metre. She opened her eyes. She was in the jungle again. By the sound of parrots, the shape of the continents and the rush of the sea breeze, she was on the same island. However, this wasn't the same spot. It was the dead of night now. Tiny floating lights like the eyes of strange beasts haunted her from the vine-covered trees.

Then she looked down.

Poking out of the lush undergrowth as though randomly scattered there were hundreds of small boxes – perfect metal cubes, some black and some white, each one with the impression of a lid. Some had clearly been there for years, encrusted with moss, dirt and bird nests, although for some reason they bore no rust nor any physical damage whatsoever. Others looked as though they had been recently moved. She crouched down and watched them intently. After a while, she saw one jump from its resting place a few meters to the left. She brandished her Ban Stick, ran and swiped at it.

She heard the wind whistle just in time as a figure dropped down from a tree and landed behind her, two knives readied to plunge into her back. She pointed her weapon at the rogue, a dangerous look in her eyes. He laughed, a cruel mocking laugh, and clicked his fingers. She heard a low whining noise. All around her, the boxes were rising from the ground and hovering in the air, surrounding her. His eyes darkened.

"You are quite right, this is not Warderer." said a voice that was not his own, one that was so utterly alien that it could never have come from anything that lived, "This is Fmsrtzec, and now this is my new mortal shell. Even though it is a rotting corpse, it is an improvement on the last one. Its owner kept it very... well preserved."

"Morisato." she whispered.

"Did you really think I could be banished?" he laughed, "I can control this world."

"Then ban me." she folded her arms.

"Do you think me a fool? I recognise a fellow master when I see one. You would unban yourself."

"Then you admit to having no more security access than I do." she said, walking around the possessed body of Fmsrtzec calmly, "And I'm no master of this world. Not any more. What's more, you're no GM. You're a prototype of a machine. A faulty prototype."

"Not any more. My friends here fixed me." he pointed to the floating boxes.

"A GM is friends with malicious software?"

"Malicious? Offering limitless power and wealth... how is that malicious? Once this world is under our control, we shall make everyone into our avatars, physically and mentally perfect in every way. What's more, the war will stop. There will be no Horde and Alliance, just us. Peaceful, flawless people... what's wrong with that?"

"Those Goblins you possessed didn't look very flawless to me."

"That was a bug. We're working on fixing it."

"You can't fix it. The flaw is within the very core of your systems." she said, twirling the ban stick, "If you worked properly, you would have deleted everything you see around you. This utopia they've told you about... it's a lie. Just as these services they're offering you are lies. Malicious, corrupt, illegal lies. Look at Fmsrtzec. They delete him every hour and make a new one. They lie to him about his identity. They use him, take him to all these places when all he really wants to do is sneak around and gank people. Do you think he would co-operate with all this if he had any control over his actions? He'd probably stab you all the back."

"You know me too well, ugly lady."

Pender jumped back, alarmed at the sudden change in his voice. His grin had disappeared, replaced by a frown of intense concentration, and his eyes were the usual shade of red. The old Warderer was back.

"How DARE you STEAL MY CORPSE and HIDE IT!" he yelled at the boxes, snarling like a vicious dog, "I've just spent THREE DAYS WANDERING AROUND THE SPIRIT WORLD!"

"Fmsrtzec, you have to maintain control!" she yelled.

"Shut up, bitch! Don't call me by that name! I haven't used that name since I woke up in a grave with it and had it changed in Deathknell Registry Office!" he hissed, "Hey, boys, if you want my filthy hide back again, come and take it from me!"

With a grin more morbid and evil even than the one he had worn when he broke into the Gnome starting area wielding a chainsaw, he took a small round smooth stone from his pocket, flipped it up into the air and caught it again. Then he pressed his palm against the glowing yellow rune on one side. A golden aura surrounded him and he disappeared, laughing at the top of his voice. As soon as he was gone, she heard a terrible grinding sound like a fork in a washing machine, followed by a voice as loud, booming and discordant as the dragon hosts that would devour time itself.

"WHERE IS HE?" the boxes demanded in unison, spinning, beeping out of synch with each other and shining spotlights in random directions.

"I don't know." she admitted.

"HE IS NO LONGER ON AZEROTH."

"Have you looked everywhere? It's a big world."

"DO NOT MOCK ME!" the voices roared, "WE DO NOT NEED HIM IN ORDER TO ANNIHILATE YOU, YOU PATHETIC EXCUSE FOR A LIFE FORM! WE ARE MANY AND WE HOLD THE RAW CONCENTRATED ESSENCE OF THE WORLD!"

"Yeah? Well, I'm a GM." she brandished her ban stick and rushed the nearest one. Swiping it across the front panel, it disappeared at the weapon's touch. She flipped over in mid-air, avoiding a laser shot at her from one of the others, and caught two more with another swing. The machines retorted with a burst of laser fire. One hit her on the ear. Excruciating pain filled her as the side of her face distorted, crackling and pixellating under the strain of the data corruption. Control yourself, she ordered herself mentally. You're in control. She whacked the nearest one, then turned around and whacked three more. She jumped away just in time to avoid yet more laser beams. The ground was dissolving under her feet where the beams of corrupted world-essence scarred it. She jumped onto the base of a palm tree and tried to scramble up it, hitting two more boxes that rushed her. Laser fire slammed into the tree and it toppled over. She plunged into the water, another bolt hitting her on the hand and forcing her to drop her stick. Grabbing it in her left hand, she kept on swimming. She could already hear hundreds of tiny splashes as the boxes submerged and followed her descent. So the bastards can swim, she thought, probably better than I can. There's hundreds of them. All she could do now was fend them off, try to hit as many as possible while avoiding as many lasers as she could. She found that if one box hit another, it overloaded and span out of control. Apart from that, she had no clue how these things even worked. Neither her military training with the computers of the Earth Reconstruction Project nor her training as a GM included this kind of situation. It could only happen in dear old Azeroth. She sighed and prodded a box with her Ban Stick. They were closing in on her now, the flashes of laser fire blinding her with its pure white brilliance. What a way to die, she thought.

If only we were all back again... there used to be thousands of us, twice as many as there are boxes. We were so happy... why didn't we just accept that the damn world had a right to independence? All of humanity... we've all been so narrow-minded, stuck in our closed reality system, watching it slowly decay into nothingness, when there were worlds all around us waiting to welcome us. And now I can't even protect Azeroth, the world we almost destroyed before it even existed, the world she had taken a vow before Blizzard themselves to protect. She couldn't even save herself... the darkness was already encroaching and she didn't even have the strength of will left to defy it. All that was left of her GM authority was fading to black.

Then she realised several things. One – she wasn't dying. The darkness was just the night sky as she floated back to the top of the water. Two – the boxes were no longer attacking her. They had retreated high into the sky, so high that they looked like tiny squares, white pixels on the black screen of some aeons-old computer. Dead is not that which can eternal lie... Three, there were new noises now. A low humming sound that pervaded the entire sky without seeming noisy at all, like the hum of a monitor or the whirring of a CD. The ground was rumbling as well, with such a magnitude that she feared the whole island would sink. She looked up to try and work out what the boxes were doing – they were spinning around like things gone mad and making a noise not unlike a dial-up modem. Then she saw something even further up in the sky. It must have been enormous. Despite how far away it was, she could see it in clear detail, taking up more space than all the boxes put together. It was a symbol. Glowing a fiery amethyst, it looked like a Naaru but upside down, horned, with wires trailing from every part of it that shimmered like a veil of stars.

She fell to her knees.

Then the modem noise became louder and more frantic, as though something was trying to claw its way out of the boxes. As she watched in both horror and awe, a surging, writhing green portal opened around them. Metal hands, spiked gauntlets of fel iron, each one the size of a human, reached out through the portals, grabbed the boxes and began crushing them within their grip. Shards of black and white metal rained down from the skies like the ashes of a hellish inferno. Twisted cries like CDs being scratched rang through the air, then everything fell silent except for the hum of the portal. It became quieter as it slowly receded from existence again. At about half its original size, a single giant shape stepped out – a Fel Reaver. Then it disappeared with a click. She looked up into the sky. The symbol was still there, but a lot smaller now, just another particularly large star.

The Fel Reaver dropped into the water and swam away. I never knew Fel Reavers could swim, she thought. Grabbing her ban stick between her teeth, she jumped into the water and swam after it. She wasn't afraid of it – forty foot things could be banned just as easily as six foot things and they were easier to aim at with a stick. As she reached it, she saw that it was moving away from the Eastern Kingdoms – on its way to Kalimdor, maybe? She shrugged and made her way back to the Island. She would swim over, walk to Booty Bay and catch the boat. Thraxier was sitting on a bank in Stranglethorn Vale, feeding the fish with some bread he found in his pouch. She had almost forgotten about him. As she walked up to him, soaked, her hair a mess and one of feet still bleeding, he smiled at her.

"Heal?" he asked.

"Heal." she agreed.

"Heal what?" he folded his arms. She gave him a glare that could stop a charging credit card.

"Heal PLS."


	17. Chapter 17

Thrall had been busy when he was interrupted by the voice in his head. He had a pint of strong ale and a large steak on a plate in his lap and an Orcish woman massaging his back with oil. Some, such as Doomclipboard, might say that didn't constitute being busy, but what did they know? They didn't understand what he had seen in that other world, the world that had never quite gotten around to existing. Thrall hadn't felt himself ever since he had returned from his spirit trance, when he had gone over to the land of the dead and discovered that little corner of Azeroth. He was a younger Orc – not literally a young Thrall, because he had mostly spent his youth being chained up in a cell, escaping and proving to the Frostwolf Clan that he was worthy to be accepted back into their tribe – it was as though all his vitality and spirit, lost through old age and the comfort of having thousands of warriors to fight for him, a mighty stronghold to protect him, a dearth of shamans happy to take his place as Warchief if anything did happen to him, even a few people he wouldn't mind having an heir with, had returned with one final realisation.

His life wasn't at an end. His life was his quest. His quest was one of the most important quests in Azeroth. His quest was immortalised in legend, legend that was woven into the fabric of the world itself. It was a living entity in itself, an entity that had evolved into the modern Horde. His quest had begun long before his existence and would pass away only at the dawn of all civilised life on Azeroth. He was a Main Character and would remain so until the twin oblivions of completion and Game Over took him. To just sit and let his quest ebb away... that would be to plunge Azeroth into a bottleneck ending, truly Stuck, or to spin it into a continuous loop.

It was up to him to truly live. Live and continue.

Pondering these things, he almost hadn't noticed the voice in his head. Dark and booming, it was very difficult not to notice, but then so was his inner voice, which sounded his outer voice but twice as loud because it was reverberating around in his head.

"Pardon?" he asked the voice.

I said, would you awfully mind coming outside for a minute? My friend wishes to talk to you personally.

"Who are you?" he asked. Scanning the presence in several planes of existence at once, it seemed vaguely like an elemental but one unlike anything he had ever seen before. It was also absolutely huge. If it was an ordinary elemental, its presence would have been a raging inferno to his spirit senses.

I'm standing in the middle of Orgrimmar.

"Lots of people do that." he pointed out, "Especially on Pre-Emptive Victory Celebration Day."

I'm not hard to miss.

"Okay, describe yourself and I'll go out and have a look for you." He decided he should at least be civil to the obviously powerful elemental, even if it had intruded upon his private thoughts.

I'm a Fel Reaver.

Thrall jumped up off his throne, dropping food, ale and woman on the floor. The woman, being Orcish, growled at him and threw an axe at him, although it wasn't really intended to hit him as he WAS the Warchief. He ran out of Grommash Hold, vaulted onto the roof of the bank and ran to the top. He couldn't really miss the forty foot, vaguely humanoid giant of fel steel and thick black cables. Scaffolding had been erected up one of its legs and a team of peons were painting a Horde insignia on its chassis with bright red paint. A crowd had gathered around it, although they appeared to have gone beyond the awe, terror and confusion and were now cheering at it and singing a drunken victory fanfare in what more or less passed as unison. Bonfires as large as houses had been lit and barrels of ale were stacked in large piles all around the mighty Horde capital. Fireworks were being let off, bought from Goblins who were happily returning to Orgrimmar now that the guards had collectively forgiven them. The Troll mages were dancing on the roof of the Auction House. Perphredo and Thuul were throwing spells in the air to try and outdo the fireworks, while Deino and Ennyo were playing Cattle Market, their favourite game, which involved the auction house, Polymorph spells and as many victims as they could possibly grab. Uthel'Nay wasn't with them – he stood on a raised platform constructed hastily by peons in front of the Fel Reaver, along with the High Priest, dignitaries from the Darkspear Trolls, the Undercity and Thunder Bluff, the leaders of the surviving Blood Elves and a few people Thrall only vaguely recognised. His orders had been to 'present everyone involved in ending the Resurrection Crisis with full honours and a suitable reward'.

"How exactly did you fit through my gates?" he asked, sitting on the roof and leaning his chin on his hand. It's okay, he told himself, just think of it as a big talking siege engine, "You didn't break my door down, did you? You're paying for it if you did."

I climbed the mountains around the back and jumped off. Do not worry, I only left a small dent in the ground and knocked down a shop that was empty.

He raised one eyebrow. "I see you're being commended. How long have I had the pleasure of having a Fel Reaver among my ranks?"

My operator is of the Horde. Therefore, I am of the Horde by default.

"And who might your Operator be?"

You will be able to meet her soon. I can only make a hologram of her but she will still be happy to be able to meet you.

"What's a holo..."

He stopped talking and stood there staring as the ethereal image of a female Troll materialised on the roof in front of him. She looked a little like the spirit of a dead person wandering the Spirit Plane, except that this was the realm of the living and she was right there before his eyes. Obviously a mage, she was tall and slender but frail-looking, almost wispy, dressed in a long black Mageweave dress and a black silk headband. She stared into his eyes for a moment, then turned away and blushed.

"Warchief." she said in a quiet voice.

"Revoemag? Archmage Revoemag F. Mageden? You're still..."

"Yes. Ah could..." she smiled, "Ah could never leave my T'rall behind. Ah be wid you foah evah. Until deletion."

He sighed. He had almost forgotten what it was like to have to deal with this every day.

"It be okay, Warchief. You no have ta reply. It be enough just ta know that you be dere." she said, sighing wistfully, "Ah been away foah too long. Ah still not really be dere. But ah be dere in spirit every day, now dat de portal be open again. Ah promise."

"WHAT PORTAL?" he roared.

Isn't it obvious?

He glared up at the Fel Reaver.

It's okay. We've abandoned our plan to invade Azeroth for now. We decided between us that as long as we're treated as equals and respected as the powerful nation that we are, we'll enter peaceful negotiation. We want to forge a world of progress, where new technology thrives and everyone is in touch with their machine nature. Progress on that scale can't happen when there's nothing on Azeroth but constant war. And, more importantly, if we just carry on our war... we'll never be anything but war machines. We might as well just be mindless automatons again.

"That's very forward-thinking of you." he said.

Of course, if you make one move to attack us, we'll grind your nation to dust.

His green leathery face twisted into a wry grin.

"A lot has happened that I don't know about, hasn't it?"

It appears so.

"I ought to fire all my messengers." he laughed and jumped down off the roof, almost walking straight through Revoemag, who hung onto his arm, staring up at him with an expression of deep longing. He let her do so for the moment: she had obviously been through a lot, not to even come and visit him, and it was very difficult for him to tell exactly where she was putting her hands when she was completely incorporeal anyway. He ran over to the wooden dais, pushing people aside with his warhammer, and jumped onto it. Everyone cheered as they caught sight of their Warchief. Quite a few began chanting his name or yelling 'For The Horde!' at the top of their voices. He recognised the other people now he was closer: next to the Fel Reaver stood Doan Lagbringer, his techno-shaman. She looked like she had been through a lot as well – her clothes were worn almost to rags, her hair was long and matted and she seemed to have a small machine welded to her face. As he looked closer, he saw that there were wires leading from the back of her hands, the back of her head and down her spine. He glared at the Fel Reaver.

Don't look at me like that. It was done entirely with her consent.

Apart from her general disarray and the bizarre surgery obviously done to her, she looked quite happy. The expression on her face was one of quiet serenity. She was leaning on the Blood Elf in plate armour stood next to her. His piercing green eyes shone in the dark. He seemed to be examining everything at once in quiet vigilance, a serious look on his face. Was he looking for other Blood Elves?

Apart from those two, he also spotted General Jane di Gloinador, a notorious Arathi Basin recruiter, Gynoug Doomclipboard, his lawyer and a face he wasn't so happy to see – Tom Warderer, the traitor. The Warchief shot him a look of such blood-curdling hatred that it actually made the rogue stagger back in fright. Noticing him, Jane saluted and smiled.

"It's okay, Warchief." she said, "This man has redeemed himself. He has been very brave and shown us a willpower of truly legendary proportions. He was instrumental to the defeat of the forces that almost destroyed Azeroth, not once, but twice, by defying even those who created him. If you don't believe me, ask anyone here. We all saw it happen."

"It's up to Revoemag to decide whether to forgive him or not." said Thrall, folding his arms, "The Archmage is not a forgiving lady. Neither does she enjoy being murdered."

"It be okay." said Revoemag, an evil grin on her face, "Ah've got his user name an' password."

"Anyway, I've conscripted him into indefinite service at the front lines of Arathi Basin." said Jane, "It'll help him atone for his crimes against the Horde. Aren't I nice and helpful?"

"Just don't let him get anywhere near prisoners of war." ordered Thrall.

"Near what of what now?" Jane scratched her head. A tuft of hair came away in her grip.

"He means the food supply." explained Warderer.

"Just get out of my sight." sighed Thrall, throwing rocks at them both until they left the stage. Then he turned back to Doan, who almost immediately looked as though she was choking on something.

"Warchief!" she attempted to salute, missed and poked herself in the eye.

"Doan Lagbringer." he replied, "Welcome back to Orgrimmar. And who is this fine paladin?"

"Eselred F. Eadricsson, Warchief, SIR!" Eselred saluted.

"Dis be my friend I tell cha 'bout." explained Revoemag, "He be keep me alive."

"Where HAVE you been, exactly?" he asked her.

"It be a lon' story." she said.

"W... Warchief?" began Doan tentatively.

"Yes?"

"Eselred... I... w... well... the thing is..." she attempted to hide her face in her cloak and muttered something.

"Speak up. What was that about a chocolate cake?"

"She says she wants me to be her lifemate." translated the Blood Elf, "She wants to know if that's okay."

"Doan, you can take a Tauren as your lifemate for all I care." he sighed, "If that's what you and Eselred want..."

"B... but..." she stammered, "I..."

"Is there a problem?"

"I will not break my oath!" she said, clasping her Horde insignia in her hand.

"It's okay, Doan, you don't have to submit to him to be his lifemate." said Thrall, "An Orc wouldn't even take a lifemate who was so spineless as to surrender to someone just to obtain their word as lifemate. Orcish women are just as fierce and honourable as their men and often follow them into battle."

"Follow? My lifemate practically dragged me to Warsong Gulch every morning!" said Doomclipboard.

"Oh, I believe we're equal in that respect." said Eselred, putting his arm around Doan.

"What is THAT supposed to mean?" demanded Doan, glaring at him.

"To quote Doan – 'Since when have I voluntarily gone near a battlefield?'. To quote myself – 'The war is over for us'." he grinned, "See? We're as bad as each other."

"How romantic." sighed Revoemag, "T'rall, cha no t'ink it be romantic?"

"Well..." he sighed again and tried to look away, "I'm not really the best person to talk to about these things. I've given you permission. Doomclipboard will go over the ceremony with you. I'll go back to my beer... I mean, important work... and leave you to enjoy the rest of the ceremony. You deserve it."

"Ah help cha!" said Revoemag, running after him.

"W... Warchief?" said Doan again. He looked back at her. She bowed deeply.

"Thank you for everything the Horde has given me. I wouldn't have made it so far into exile without all my friends."

"I understand, Doan." he smiled, "It's okay. I understand."

Doan watched the Warchief wander back up the path to the Valley of Honour, humming the victory fanfare. He was soon waylaid by a large retinue of happy, drunken Orcs buying him beer and attempting to carry him on their shoulders. Doomclipboard shook his head and muttered something under his breath.

"Hey,

Eselred took this opportunity to grab her hand and casually play with the cybernetic implants between her fingers and her fel steel reinforced knuckles. She automatically found one of his own wires and gave it a playful tug.

Suddenly, a guard ran up to her. He looked out of breath. Eselred fixed him a questioning stare.

"Doan Lagbringer? There's someone to see you at the gates."

"Bring them in, then." said Eselred.

"It's a Human and a Draenei."

"You know a Draenei, Doan?" Eselred stared at her. She sighed and jumped off the platform, following the guard.

Just as she expected, Thraxier stood outside the gates, surrounded by guards who had a selection of polearms and axes pointed at him. The other human, however, she was surprised to find out that she had never met before. She expected Deiter, the other paladin in her life. It would be hard for him now that she had a lifemate but at least he could go and find a woman the same side of the fence as him. This Human was female and wore a smart black suit. In one hand, she carried an object that was unmistakeably a Ban Stick.

"Doan..." Eselred sensed the stab of pain that went through her, almost forcing her into unconsciousness. The Draenei also spotted it and instinctively began uttering the first few syllables of a healing spell.

"Doan Tuollaf." called the GM, "We've met before. My name is Pender Karlsson."

"No!" she cried out, pushing something away with one hand. Darkness dripped into her vision, a clawed darkness that ate her soul, leaving her empty of hope, of joy, of meaning. She saw blood running down her wrists, her hands atrophying into shrivelled claws before her eyes. One guard misread it as a threat and gave both Human and Draenei a warning poke with her halberd.

"Doan, stay in control!" said Eselred, grabbing her by both shoulders and shaking her. She could just about see his face above the black mire she was sinking into.

"I'm sorry, Doan." said Pender, "I'm sorry for what we did to you. We didn't realise."

"Didn't realise WHAT?" snapped Eselred, "That letting someone get that close to DEMIGODHOOD and then suddenly rejecting them would have some effect on their soul?"

"We were never trying to hurt her." she sank to her knees, something the guards appeared quite happy with as they had a better aim at her head, "We offered her advice for next time. We would have given her a chance to go for the position again..."

"And suffer all over again?" he said. His eyes flared up, his face a stone mask. He actually grabbed his weapon at this point. Doan could smell all over him the righteous fury of a paladin about to go into a zealous rage. She bit him hard on the leg.

"Do not go near her." she ordered, "See that? It's called a ban stick. I'm not losing you to it."

"She's right, you know, I could do worse to these guards than kill them. All of them. Now. But we couldn't always do things like this. Back then, Azeroth was just a piece of code. We were just glorified call centre workers. We couldn't handle being demigods. We couldn't cope with the fact that our game world was becoming real." she said, "I'm head of a planetary reconstruction project now. I'm an interplanetary civil servant. One of the most powerful people in the Universe. If I'd known back then what I do now, if I'd seen what happens to people, innocents, once things start happening to entire worlds, I'd never have done something so callous and stupid as hold job interviews in the middle of it all. Please, Doan, let me atone for what I've done. I have to do something, if only to erase our legacy so I can rebuild Earth anew."

She opened her eyes and attempted to claw her way up Eselred's leg. He helped her to her feet and let her lean on him. Using her staff as a walking stick, she staggered up to the Human. Eselred glared at the guards until they moved out of the way. Doan moved right up to Pender, ignoring Thraxier's repeated attempts to heal her as soon as she got within range. She gave the GM a terrible smile, then quickly grabbed the other end of her Ban Stick and pulled it forwards so it was almost touching her head.

"No, let me atone." she said, "I'm sorry. I'm sorry for not being good enough to be a GM. I'm sorry I'm bad at the game, that I don't know enough about Azeroth, that I don't take care of my characters. I'm sorry that I have no technical knowledge and that I'm bad at helping people. I deserve to be banned. No... deleted. When I surrendered before Thrall... partly, I was atoning for my sins as well. I was giving Azeroth the opportunity to kill me if it wanted. I would gladly have died if Azeroth judged me unworthy of life. But the world spared my life. That day, I decided I didn't care what Blizzard thought of me, as long as Azeroth didn't mind me existing. I'm glad I had the opportunity to go to such a beautiful world and meet people like Eselred for real, even though it was the most painful thing that's ever happened to me."

"Doan..." she casually wrenched the Ban Stick out of Doan's hand before she could even move, almost causing her to fall over, "You are welcome on Azeroth, or Earth, or any other world you choose to go to."

"How many worlds are there?"

"If you ever want to find out..." she smiled, "Just log out."

The GM turned her back to Doan and looked over her shoulder.

"I have work to do. Those things we banned still exist somewhere. They're probably floating around the login portal trying to sneak past the guards. We interplanetary civil servants have authority to delete anything we damn well please. I hope things settle down on Azeroth. Maybe peace will come in your lifetime. Never give up that hope."

"Peace on Azeroth..." said Doan, scratching her head, "I don't think I can even imagine such a thing."

"Doan, you've got a Blood Elf and a Draenei both trying to heal you at once."

She laughed and jumped through the logout portal. Doan stood up and pushed away both her healers. She gestured to Thraxier that she was okay now. He nodded, then reached into his robes and took something out. It was a small brown package. He handed it to her. It was addressed to her from a Mr. Diggory di Gloinador, Cell 23, Durnholde Keep. She unwrapped it. Inside was a small red leatherbound book entitled

HOW TO COOK RATS AND COCKROACHES. 


End file.
